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THE GREEK SPIRIT 






THE GREEK SPIRIT 

Phases of Its Progression in Religion, 
Polity, Philosophy and Art 



BY 

KATE STEPHENS 

M 

Author of "American Thumb-Prints : Mettle of our 

Men and Women," "A Woman's 
Heart," etc., etc. 



mew !£otft 

STURGIS & WALTON 

COMPANY 

1914 



i 



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Copyright 1914 
By STURGIS & WALTON COMPANY 



Set up and electrotyped. Published March, 1914 



MAR 26 1914 



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©CI.A36945S 



FOREWORD 

A beief account of Hellenic thought, Hel- 
lenic feeling and Hellenic will before their 
subversion by the rude genius of Macedonia, 
is within these covers. The book essays to 
make the old Greek spirit speak to the gen- 
eral reader who has never studied Greek, and, 
if he will, to the Greek student — it is an en- 
deavor to tell somewhat of the message of 
Greek thought and action, of the lifting and 
broadening of the vision of human life as- 
sociated with the social mind and will of the 
old-day Hellenes. Just as Greek ideas, for- 
gotten except by the eremite student, brought 
a new world of light to the wondering peoples 
of the west, more than four hundred and fifty 
years ago, so now, a reconsideration of Greek 
ideals might well seize the often poorly held 
or wholly unoccupied imagination of to-day 
and give to our life profounder and wider 
meaning. 

My object, I said, has been to bring out the 
spiritual perspective of that ever wonderful 

l 



ii FOREWORD 

Greek life, to give various aspects of the life 's 
evolution, to present its tendencies as a 
simple thing (as they must be in the great 
whole of human history), to point to early 
forms of many present-day ideas and usages 
which express the inward consciousness of 
man, to endeavor to turn away certain false 
conceptions of the Greeks and by holding at- 
tention to their accomplishment to show that 
they were a people whose heads were clear 
and hearts exceedingly human. 

The subject is old, much spoken about. 
Still ever new in its surpassing significance 
to all time. I hope my essay may reflect 
somewhat of the old Greek directness and 
Greek penetration of life. But any setting 
forth of the unfolding of the Hellenes ' spirit 
is apt to suggest some such cry as "Inade- 
quate," and the inevitable comparison of 
" Man's nothing-perfect to God's All-Com- 
plete." 

In mentally reviewing those to whom I am 
in this writing debtor, I am weighted with a 
sense of obligation to so many who have 
thought and taught that I am not able to call 
by name one half. The list would begin with 
the Greeks themselves and their high utter- 



FOREWORD iii 

ance. It would pass to many a worker of the 
far-away Renaissance, who with the zeal of a 
lover of his kind searched a wonderful, for- 
gotten world 

"with the throttling hands of Death at strife, 

Ground he at grammar; 
Still, thro' the rattle, parts of speech were rife. 

While he could stammer 
He settled Hoti's business — let it be — 

Properly based Oun — 
Gave us the doctrine of the enclitic De, 

Dead from the waist down." 

A glorious roll of scholars would carry the 
list on through centuries, and end only in the 
great delvers in Greek thought and Greek 
earth in this day of ours, and the learned 
conclusions of those men and women. Such 
consciousness of indebtedness forbids my in- 
cluding in these covers what is in such a work 
often deemed an essential, a bibliographical 
list. 

Psychologists tell about a law they have 
formulated — that in operations of the mind 
unconscious phenomena play a preponderat- 
ing part. For years it has been my habit to 
reread matter of special appeal. Some ex- 
pression I have gained memoriter may have 



iv FOREWORD 

crept into this essay. If this should prove a 
fact, I should regret it. To all that I know 
as quoted words I have put rigorous quota- 
tion marks, to statements indefinitely remem- 
bered such phrases as "it is said," and I most 
sincerely hope I have in no instance omitted 
that justice — poor return, it would be, for the 
delight of reading thoughtful books. 

New York, 1914. 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

GIFTS OF THE SPIRIT TO OUR EVOLUTION 3 

AEGEAN PEOPLES FORERUNNING THE 

GREEKS 23 

THEIR ART GIFT; 

THEIR RELIGION OP MOTHER EARTH; 

THEIR GOVERNMENT; 

INROADS OF PEOPLES FROM THE NORTH. 

HEROIC AGE OF THE GREEKS .... 47 

ITS RELIGION OF THE PHENOMENA OF NA- 
TURE AND THE SOCIAL GROUP; 
ITS KINGSHIP OF HEROES; 
ITS MORAL IDEAS, REVERENT FEAR, ETC.; 
THE EPIC ITS ART. 

BURGEONING DEMOCRACY; ITS PURITAN- 
ISM; ITS ART 83 

PASSING OF THE MONARCHY, OLIGARCHY, 
TYRANNUS; THE CONSTRUCTIVE INDI- 
VIDUALISM OF CITIES; 

ORPHISM, ELEUSINIAN MYSTERIES, RECRU- 
DESCENCE OF SUPERSTITION; 

EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY: PHYSICS FORE- 
CASTING MODERN SCIENCE; 

DEVELOPMENT OF LYRIC POETRY: NATIONAL 
GAMES OF THE HELLENES. 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

FIFTY YEARS OF DISTINGUISHED WORKS 203 

A DEFENSIVE, UNIFYING WAR: DEMOCRACY 

IN ATHENS ; 
RACE SPIRIT IN ARCHITECTURE ADORNING 

ATHENS, IN SCULPTURE AND ALLIED 

ARTS ; 
THE PELOPONNESIAN WAR; ITS RESULTS; 
IMPERISHABLE HISTORIES OF HERODOTUS 

AND THUCYDIDES: WHY THEY WERE 

WRITTEN ; 
RISE OF THE DRAMA; SUCH MASTERS AS 

^SCHYLUS, SOPHOCLES, EURIPIDES, 

ARISTOPHANES ; 
COMING OF THE SOPHISTS AND THE NEW 

EDUCATION ; 
SOCRATES, PLATO; PINNACLE OF THE GREEK 

ASCENT ; 

DECADENCE OF THE GREEK SPIRIT . . 301 

WHAT WERE THE CAUSES OF THE DETERIORA- 
TION ? — EXHAUSTION OF THE GREEKS ? 

MALARIA? ECONOMIC CONDITIONS? 

LOSS OF RACE CONSCIOUSNESS AND 

SUBVERSION OF IDEALS? 

DYNAMIC CHARACTERISTICS OF THE GREEKS; 
CERTAIN LIKENESSES OF GREEK AND 
AMERICAN ; 

THE COSMIC VISION THE GREEKS WORKED 
OUT. 



GIFTS OF THE GREEK SPIRIT 
TO OUR EVOLUTION 



History is the development of Spirit in Time. — Hegel, 
in The Philosophy of History. 

Mankind is not a mere collection of detached indi- 
viduals, or man could possess no knowledge of any 
unity of scientific truth. . . . Human experience is not 
merely a collection of detached observations, but forms 
an actual spiritual unity, whose type is not that of a 
mechanism, whose connections are ideally significant, 
whose constitution is essentially that which the ideal of 
unified truth requires. — Josiah Royce, in Loyalty and 
Insight. 

That society is not a mere aggregate but an organic 
growth, that it forms a whole the laws of whose growth 
can be studied apart from those of the individual alone, 
supplies the most characteristic postulate of modern 
speculation. 

Vast social organization is the work of a vast series 
of generations unconsciously fashioning the order which 
they transmit to their descendants. — Sir Leslie 
Stephen, in The Science of Ethics. 



GIFTS OF THE GREEK SPIRIT 
TO OUR EVOLUTION 

Unifoemity and necessity of natural law is 
the first great maxim of our twentieth century 
science. It leads investigators to search for 
origins, the cause behind the fact. Through 
its light phenomena themselves bear witness 
how they are and why they are. It is the 
principle upon which the sciences have reared 
their structure. In the sixth century before 
Christ this law established itself among the 
Ionians of Asia Minor. 

The second great formula of science, an- 
nounced by early Greek physicists, by 
thinkers through many ages, and finally after 
long suppression becoming a radical dictator 
of the sciences of our nineteenth century, is 
that nature is not only subject to the law of 
uniformity but that ever alongside of uni- 
formity is infinite and consistent gradation, 
that the world is a result of a process of 
growth, that more complex life grows out of 
simpler forms. This second maxim, over- 

3 



4 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

whelming many a misbelief, advances the 
study of nature toward the standard and re- 
quirement of reason whose first postulate is 
the unity of all being. 

These two maxims have gained undeniable 
results in illuminating the world of physical 
nature. But in that other world of psychical 
nature, of which we know no settled form and 
which we call the world of spirit, these prin- 
ciples have no less force and application. In 
that also is the uniformity and necessity of 
law. This, Heraclitus, a philosopher of the 
early Ionians, bespoke in part, "The sun will 
not go beyond his bounds: if he does the 
avenging deities, handmaids of justice, will 
find him out." And later Anaxagoras told 
of it, and Sophocles, with unfailing pene- 
tration and art, set forth the law in his 
dramas. 

Spirit is mysterious in its workings. We 
are ignorant of its laws. Yet in its world is 
traceable an unbroken development of con- 
sciousness from the first faint dawning in 
brute sense upon our planet and millions of 
years ago, traceable with many an off-wander- 
ing and aside but still ever clear, and rising 
through works and their aspirations — through 



GIFTS OF THE GREEKS TO OURSELVES 5 

instinct, habit, sentiment, languages, religions 
and other institutions of human amalgama- 
tion, art, literature, science, — to where the 
glorified spirit of man comprehends itself 
one with absolute reason and absolute love. 
Throughout this upward trend, this urging, 
an invisible, spiritual energy has borne on — 
by evidence with a cosmic meaning and cos- 
mic end. 

In this conception we are not far from a 
faith of the old Hellenes in a divine and uni- 
versal order in human affairs, what we to-day 
call a principle of progress, enduring through 
many phases of the Greek spirit, and evi- 
dencing itself in their state, their literature 
and their art. 

Strata of our earth make clear records of 
foregoing and material forms of life. In the 
records of the spirit are also shining ages 
and epochs, more full and more intelligible 
than the history mere matter has written — 
records preserved in the inspiration the hu- 
man race has voiced in its poetry and prose, 
in the metals and marbles the race has 
brought from the earth's recesses and 
wrought in arts, in the laws and politics its 
peoples have founded and conducted for the 



6 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

common weal — all golden fossils of uplifting 
and outspreading life. 

Spirit, the expansive force of the world, 
grows towards ideas. Ideas are the eternal 
forms which spirit ever tends to assume. 
We measure the growth of spirit by the ideas 
which inform it. Enormous and mixed popu- 
lations with a» composite and inharmonious 
and often misleading culture, make history an 
apparent confusion. Still universal history is 
but a record of the growth of spirit, an or- 
derly process, a legitimate, gesetzmassig de- 
velopment, an evolution from factors we 
seek to find. To this process of growth many 
races have brought an appreciable contribu- 
tion. 

Between all nations and communities of 
men there is an importing of thought, a carry- 
ing from one to another. Even in remote 
times this was true. For instance, the an- 
cient .iEgean peoples which foreran the Greek 
seized upon certain forms in the more an- 
cient Asiatic and Egyptian civilizations, sav- 
ing and continuing in the godlike and compre- 
hensive art of a later day the early evolving 
beauty. More purely in the realm of ideas is 
the bearing upon, and gift of Orphic mysti- 



GIFTS OF THE GREEKS TO OURSELVES 7 

cism to budding Christianity. No people ever 
takes up a problem where another has laid it 
down, nor ever takes it up with the same 
grasp and disposition — race character and 
race traits forbid. 

Some peoples thrive by whatever might in- 
heres in them, and then perish according to 
the law of their organic growth, leaving to 
later dwellers on this earth little record of 
their work — no more perhaps than some 
ruined house of a god or of a warrior, or 
buried shards of folk pottery, or merely the 
form and inner savings of a serpent-mound. 
Such nations seemingly have no heirs. The 
strength and vitality of other peoples, again, 
pass on and flourish through many times and 
among alien nations, vast, resurgent factors 
in evolution. 

It is the fortune of ancient Greece to have 
thought and wrought for the world. Com- 
pared with the life of this earth which scien- 
tists of these days say is not below fifty-five 
millions of years, and may run into several 
hundreds of millions, the centuries the spirit 
of Greece dured in splendid triumph are as 
the flight of a bird through a summer garden. 
In that brief moment, however, Greece not 



8 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

only wrought for generations that have lived 
their life upon this earth and died since her 
strong spirit shone forth, but for whatever 
generations may continue to think and upon 
this planet work out their gift to the uni- 
versal life. She received and rationalized 
the better part of the content of more ancient 
civilizations and preserved to us whatever of 
their substance was true, and she clearly and 
gloriously inaugurated the new era of the do- 
minion of mind over nature. 

Much of the most delicate spirit of Hellas, 
the perfect bloom of her spirit, perished with 
her ancient free people. Much of what is 
finest of her growth yields only to patient 
and arduous study. Yet how vast has been 
her impetus to us younger peoples, and how 
greatly have Greek thought and Greek art 
and Greek polities affected our own ! 

The Hellene was the first of western races 
to think, and to know that what he was doing 
was thinking. Custom petrified into mean- 
ingless form, auguries, incantations delivered 
in cataleptic trance, fantastic outgrowths of 
the human mind and denying the very facts 
of life, negating human sympathy, human 
equality and human interest — these were the 



GIFTS OF THE GREEKS TO OURSELVES 9 

forms of intellectual life. The Greek was the 
first to proclaim the sovereign power of ra- 
tional reflection. Therefore he created sci- 
ence, scientific method of patient analysis 
and unbiased research, and philosophy. 

The Greek was the first to feel that the 
beautiful has its own laws, that its cult is the 
most ennobling pleasure — nay, more than a 
pleasure, an ideal to be worshiped through all 
sorrows and toils. The Hellene therefore 
created art. Before him was only ostentation 
and ornamentation. 

The Hellene, again, recognized that the 
good is an end in itself, that the laws of con- 
duct are the laws of reason. Before the noon- 
tide of his great day other peoples attempted 
ethical systems. In Egypt they had a stereo- 
typed ritual controlled by a priesthood, the 
people from the king up barren from arid 
omens, their mental power so weakened by 
an affluent material civilization that they 
bartered themselves — slavery and intellectual 
abnegation in this world for good luck in the 
world to come; blessedness in the everlast- 
ing mansions of an eternal life the priests 
promised, if the people would here yield to 
their guidance and follow their counsel. 



10 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

In the countries of the orient Chinese seers 
wrought a colossal, iron-grooved ceremonial 
for the numberless relations of human life — 
a servile worship of form, reason without 
sense of human freedom, laws of living suited 
to a so-called Superior Man. 

Nations of India, struggling for ages to 
loose the sense of brooding mystery, the 
mental cramp in which her exuberant, over- 
awing nature held their spirit, filled with 
formless yearning after the sublime immen- 
sity without and rules of human action within, 
had sunk paralyzed into inactivity, into a 
comfortless religion fettered with caste, fatal- 
ism and gods of monstrous form, into silent 
servility to tradition, prescribed formula and 
fear to offend the gods by enquiry into causes. 
Science, literature — knowledge by which they 
could be free — was to the people of India a 
theological secret kept in the gloom of a 
temple and subjected to temple inspiration. 
Impiety alone would prompt the unveiling. 
Priests, a segregated caste who lived by the 
altar, received any new gain in human wis- 
dom and reserved it to themselves. 

The story of the Hebrews, told in our Bible, 
is often saturated with a feeling towards mo- 



GIFTS OF THE GREEKS TO OURSELVES 11 

rality. Its tale testifies that the Hebrews suf- 
fered frightful lapses in promulgation of 
human duties. For instance, in the nine- 
teenth chapter of Leviticus, where the laws of 
neither dealing falsely, neither lying one to 
another, nor defrauding thy neighbor, and 
payment before another day of him that is 
hired, are followed by the injunction "thou 
shalt not respect the person of the poor." 
Both Leviticus and Deuteronomy are rich in 
promises of material blessings to those walk- 
ing in the way of the Lord and of disaster to 
those who forsake that path. Job's friends 
had at hand such formulas of moral govern- 
ment. In the old patriarchal theory of life 
the righteous would be prosperous, the wicked 
"poor." Desperate sight of the reverse con- 
dition led later to outcries in certain of the 
Psalms. All through its course portrayed in 
the Bible, Israel stood awed before the moral 
government of the world, and only in a com- 
paratively late day worked out an ethical 
cult. 1 

1 "The Israelites were slow in attaining conceptions 
of sin and at no time prior to the publication of the 
Gospel were they able to combine their conceptions 
into coherent doctrines." — Dr. Francis J. Hall, in 
Evolution and the Fall. 



12 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

Before the Greeks, throughout the ancient 
world there was in ethics little save hieratic 
authority. The Hellenes, unhampered by 
worship of sacred writings, or by dogmatism 
of a priest caste, gifted with the instinct 
which allowed the harmonious unfolding of 
human powers and capacities, had in their in- 
born self -limitation guides to morality. Life 
to them was penetrated with an ethical in- 
stinct. Their power of analysis — asking in 
the moral world what they asked in the phys- 
ical, why should there be human duty, what 
are the principles of conduct, the law of hu- 
man action — united to their sense of propor- 
tion, their sentiment of and feeling for hu- 
manity, their sensibility to man's function in 
the social organism, created their dialectic 
in ethics, their science of morality. 

The Hellene, gifted, we say, with the in- 
stinct which organized political life and obe- 
dience to the public spirit of the laws, discov- 
ered that the state is rational, that its form 
should correspond to its function, that gov- 
ernment is, as has been phrased to-day, the 
corporate reason of the community. Thus he 
was the first to announce political liberty. 
Before him society had swerved between des- 



GIFTS OF THE GREEKS TO OURSELVES 13 

potisni and anarchy, or, as at times with the 
Jews, to theocracy. There had been no at- 
tempt to reconcile the freedom and good of 
the state and the freedom and good of the in- 
dividual. The Hellene's practical morality 
went hand in hand with his civic freedom, and 
was in fact united to and disciplined by it. 

This, in part, is what Greece gave to the 
evolution of the spirit of man. These were 
her factors. And even in the law which pre- 
vails to-day, the fundamental expansion of 
which is the real glory of Rome, and in the 
religion which prevails to-day, the founda- 
tion of which is an illumination and glory of 
ancient Judaea, the share of the Greek is 
great. Without Greece we should never have 
had the law of Rome. Nor should we have 
had that religion from Judaea which to-day 
practices and perpetuates phases of a glowing 
Greek mysticism and Greek rites and Greek 
ritual — a religion passing from precepts of 
ethical conduct, the Sermon on the Mount, to 
the emphasis of belief in a dogmatic Nicene 
creed, from the mighty moral enthusiasm of 
its Teacher to the ethics of the Roman law. 

Greece was master of the intellect of man 
in the world then known from the spread of 



14 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

her ideas in the fourth century before Christ 
to the time of Justinian, when Plato's acad- 
emy, the first school of philosophy opened at 
Athens, was also the last to be closed (529 A. 
D.). The spirit of Hellas had a complete 
historic continuity, not by ideas alone but 
by many definite institutions and works. 
Fathers of the Church were often trained in 
old Greek ideas and in the rhetorical methods 
of itinerant teachers called sophists. Their 
homily, a fusion of exhortation and teaching, 
was made after the manner of sophists' public 
addresses, and as about the sophists disciples 
and other auditors crowded and acclaimed, so 
about the great preachers. Greek rhetoric, 
that is, created the form of the Christian 
sermon, just as Greek philosophy projected 
the Christian dogmatic creed. Amid the 
cloisters and gloom of the Middle Ages a pet- 
rifaction of Aristotelianism, known as Scho- 
lasticism, buttressed the doctrines of the 
Church. Without Greece we should not have 
had the science which then served stably. 
Nor in the ninth century a mystic Neo- 
Platonism finding life's end in ecstasy and 
rapt contemplation of the divine. Nor 
should we have had the Eenaissance after 



GIFTS OF THE GREEKS TO OURSELVES 15 

long imprisonment of the spirit of man. 
Even till to-day Greece is the master of the 
intellect of man. 

Thus closely are the Greeks our spiritual 
ancestors. The Greek mind and its products 
are the first flowering of the European peo- 
ples. Constructive Greeks set forth the first 
science, the first art, the first freedom, the 
first devotion to self-imposed laws, the first 
impulse of man to independent stable growth. 
They were the first people to be free in in- 
tellect, free in art and free in politics. The 
saying of Pericles of Athens to his fellow 
Athenians regarding their colonies may meet 
broadest application : — "We shall not be with- 
out witnesses assuredly: mighty documents 
of our power these are, which shall make us 
the wonder of ages to come." 

But Greece was not always the land of the 
spirit. In the rude works of her infancy the 
vision of a seer would hardly foresee the 
height and glory of the Hellenes' prime. 
The way was to be long, and hundreds of 
generations were to build with no glimmer of 
the coming race's glory. Great outpourings 
of the spirit of life, and any expressive ra- 
diance to the eyes of men, must for matur- 



16 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

ing have not only time for factor, but also 
environment. That they, the Greeks, so 
mightily surpassed all civilizations of their 
day is, perhaps, in one measure due to their 
country and the plenitude of life and joy ac- 
corded them in that land now consecrated 
from their having evolved and wrought their 
miracle there. Spiritual energy, "root of be- 
ing,' ' seems to have found in their life less 
obstacle to evolution of its reflective reason 
than elsewhere, and more plastic conditions 
for expressing itself in beauty through the 
hand of man. 

The home of this people, of all lands at that 
point in the evolution of the human race best 
calculated to further its indwellers' harmo- 
nious development, included the eastern main- 
land of Mediterranean Europe, the most 
western coast of Asia Minor, and the beauti- 
ful islands that lie between — mountains half- 
submerged, cutting their way out of the wine- 
bright sea and seeming to rest like birds upon 
its waters. In the Greeks' years this sea was 
the great highway of the world's travel. 

European Greece, the mainland of theirs, 
projecting far into the ^Egean and turning a 
waiting front towards Asia, was cleft by har- 



GIFTS OF THE GREEKS TO OURSELVES 17 

bor-seeking waters. That is, a thousand 
bays and gulfs cut into its coasts. Within, 
the land lay in countless vales and mountain 
sides. In some parts a fertile glebe blessed 
it. In others the scant soil that educates its 
people for mastership; "not always," said 
Herodotus at the end of his history, ' ' does the 
same earth bear wonderful crops and most 
valiant men. ' ' 

Cereals grew in sunlit tillage, the grape 
sacred through its use in the religions of 
many peoples, the gray-green olive, other 
esculent fruits, and horned cattle grazed in 
meadows dotted by benefactive forest trees. 
Here and there healthful and sparkling 
waters sprang from hillsides and ran in 
streams to the sea. Above spread a clear 
and lambent air — it is claimed that the Greek 
love of precise form resulted from clear-cut 
outline in their lucid atmosphere. Over all 
temperateness in climate — at Colonus near 
Athens the golden eye of the crocus shone 
through its cup in that month we know as 
February, and in springtime in green valleys, 
says Sophocles, the clear-voiced nightingale 
sang her sweet lament under the dark ivy 
sacred to Bacchus. 



18 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

Eesponse to environment is a potent factor 
in evolution. From this face of nature and 
its conditions, there was not only the possi- 
bility, there was a foreordained necessity that 
here an unparalleled civilization should 
evolve — unless some subtle form of human 
decay, possibly by endemic parasitic fevers, 
of which in the earlier days we find no sign, 
or some disastrous earthquake should cut 
evolution short. Nature's very chiseling of 
the main home in hill and bosky hollow, thus 
making difficult inter-communication by land, 
proved in early times a furtherer of devel- 
opment, even if later a fault. It worked 
against formation of a central government 
strong enough to control the segregated peo- 
ples. Each hill was a natural wall to bar out 
a neighbor wishing to raid for pastime or 
gain, and led, in a race of such potentialities 
as the Greeks', to quietude needed for self -de- 
veloping labor. And it helped make the 
Greeks seafarers. Each snug valley with its 
water way had in itself a possible walled mar- 
ket. The sea's power of easy roadway cut- 
ting into this compactness threw together the 
shepherd of the hills, the husbandman of the 
plain and trading sailor. Here began the 



GIFTS OF THE GREEKS TO OURSELVES 19 

many-sided cultivation of the Greek. A 
mother-land's slenderness as well as poverty 
trained her workers to labor and kept out 
cupidious inraiders. 

When Greek colonies settled in Sicily and 
neighboring lands of the Mediterranean 
basin, not unlike conditions prevailed, and 
with the nascent Greek mind for their plastic 
material evoked not unlike development. 
Even the name of one of those clusters of 
Greek life, an old cradle of vigorous broods, 
Arcadia in the Peloponnesus, albeit the 
country may now have harsh climate and un- 
grateful soil, signifies to our day teeming 
pastures and well-wooded mountain-sides 
watered by cascades and streams, crowned 
with a temperate and energizing climate and 
peopled by hardy, clean-limbed, quick-witted 
dwellers of the soil. 

One of the marvels of this people, one of 
the miracles of the world's development, is 
that in the broad, outlying, widely separated 
lands of Hellas with appalling stretches of 
water between, a race could keep to its dis- 
tinction and purity of race spirit, could pre- 
serve itself even in remote colonies where in- 
termarriage with neighbor of alien blood 



20 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

must have been common. The Greeks were 
of many tribes and differing dialects, and of 
the various life-experiences of the rich and 
the poor. But whatever else they may have 
been, they were always and invariably Greek 
— beings endued with a many-sided harmony 
and growth. 



AEGEAN PEOPLES FORERUN- 
NING THE GREEKS 



All beginnings are obscure. . . . The sources of his- 
tory, too, can only be tracked at a footpace. They 
must be followed to their fount, like the current of a 
stream which springs in a mountain fastness. — Theo- 
dor Gomperz, in Greek Thinkers. 

The continuity of human development has been such 
that most, if not all, of the great institutions which still 
form the framework of civilized society have their roots 
in savagery, and have been handed down to us in these 
later days through countless generations, assuming new 
outward forms in the process of transmission, but re- 
maining in their inmost core substantially unchanged. — 
James George Frazer, in Lectures on the Early History 
of the Kingship. 

We may take it then . . . that the iEgean civilization 
was indigenous, firmly rooted and strong enough to 
persist essentially unchanged and dominant in its own 
geographical area throughout the Neolithic and Bronze 
Ages. — David George Hogarth, in "^Egean Civiliza- 
tion," Encyclopaedia Britannica, Eleventh Edition. 



22 



^GEAN PEOPLES FORERUN- 
NING THE GREEKS 

Who the Hellenes were, what was their 
origin, we can not with present-day lenses see. 
They are plainly a people apart in their pos- 
sibilities of development, and running back to 
millennia cut off from our peering and mysti- 
fied vision by an opaque veil— back to that 
past in which we see but in conjecture various 
race divergences. Science calls palaeolithic 
and neolithic their centuries without record 
save that studiously exhumed. 

Perhaps their main stock had originally 
come from the south, from Africa, had settled 
over inviting peninsulas and gone to the 
northeast, Troad and Phrygia, and westward 
along the sea 's water ways even to Sicily and 
Spain. It is possible, an archaeologist has 
suggested, that the western-most settlers had 
migrated so far back in the years that they 
journeyed by land from Africa to Italy. In 
exhumed fragments portrayals of these peo- 
ples show that they were a dark-haired, dark- 

23 



24 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

eyed race; that they had a completely devel- 
oped, long, well-balanced head and slender, 
alert body of medium height. 

There may have been more than one pre- 
Hellenic stratum in the population. Greeks 
of historic days called the mysterious, early 
peoples of the land Pelasgians, "people of 
the sea." A historian of theirs, Herodotus, 
who had an ear for folk tradition and the ad- 
vantage of us by more than twenty-three hun- 
dred years, declared the Pelasgians and 
Greeks were one. The blood of the early peo- 
ples was doubtless a chief element in the his- 
toric Greeks'. 

Our first record of these evolving peoples, 
-ZEgean let us call them, is in remains un- 
earthed by learned and earnest delvers — in 
works when these forerunners of the Greeks 
were still primitive, during the stage of evolu- 
tion that made axes and arrowheads, saws, 
combs and beads of stone. In predatory ex- 
cursions and fights between clans, bronze 
came gradually into use for weapons of war. 
Bronze came to serve also for personal adorn- 
ment, and with clay utensils for household 
use. Iron was not yet introduced. But the 
soil-dweller in that land of a radiant future 



^GEANS FORERUNNING THE GREEKS 25 

had in his bronze a medium which fired his 
imagination by the possible wonders it put 
before him. The career of Greek art had in 
rude way begun. 

A distinctive mark of the spirit of these 
early dwellers was the power of forming an 
ideal and working material towards its reali- 
zation — a sense of beauty drawing them to- 
ward material, an instinct to express in their 
works the ideal form they felt. Also a re- 
ceptivity of the excellence of others' work, 
but the subduing the foreign element to their 
own character. Here may have been the 
origin of that disposition, aptitude, tempera- 
ment, which grew as the people evolved, until 
it became a feeling and mental capacity for 
measure and loveliness, a productive genius 
which, when its race was fused with another, 
worked out universal types surpassing all 
others — a unique sense of beauty which has 
never filled the soul of any other people. 

In rude and archaic decoration of lines 
scratched in plastic clay we have the testi- 
mony of the childlike early workers' hand. 
Again in vases not unlike in ornament but 
made upon the rotating wheel. Then, the 
evolution of the art being unbroken and the 



26 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

triumph of metal working affecting their 
ceramics, the adorning more graciously de- 
veloped by paint upon the buff surface, or by 
covering the surface with black pigment and 
drawing on it designs in white and red, and 
sometimes orange. 

At first in their bronze metal this people 
made instruments for cutting, such as axes 
and swords. Also, rudely, statuettes or idols. 
As the centuries passed and the craft became 
a part of themselves, that is, when complete 
knowledge of what they could do with their 
material gave them the spirit of freedom, 
their work became more shapely and truer, 
till at last they wrought of bronze, rings, dag- 
gers, fibulae, swords of excelling workman- 
ship and distinction, vessels for ceremonial 
use; and of gold, buttons, masks, headtire, 
necklaces and cups before the artistry of 
which metal workers to-day stand astonished. 
Their product is not in character ornamental 
or illustrative : it is ripe art having as its end 
beauty and truth. Engraved gems also with 
device of lion, dolphin, ox, goose, chariot, and 
horse were common in .ZEgean or pre-Greek 
centuries as amulets and signets. 

In their masonry and later architecture of 



^EGEANS FORERUNNING THE GREEKS 27 

vast palaces and tombs these swarming peo- 
ples, laboring and building for Greece, show 
to our eyes how they developed the construc- 
tion of walls— first building with rough lime- 
stone blocks lifted one upon the other with- 
out regularity or order, set in clay and 
strengthened with plaster; then with stones 
carefully hewn and laid in horizontal courses, 
the medium being mortar; and third, with 
polygonal masonry. 

The form and perfection of architecture of 
later Greece is the perfect blossom of an evo- 
lution begun in this early age. The grace- 
ful strength of the Doric column may fairly 
be supposed a development of an earlier col- 
umn; and the distinctive cella of the Greek 
temple with its fore standing portico, as well 
as the gable roof above, is doubtless the ves- 
tibulum and hall within, and covering of, ruins 
deemed ancient by the Hellenes. The en- 
trance of the palace found at Tiryns is the 
plan of the foregate or Propylaea at Athens. 

The art of these early Mediterranean peo- 
ples was racial and independent, we said. It 
was not a thing taken on or assumed in cul- 
tural affectation or imitation. It was genu- 
inely a product of the gray matter of their 



28 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

long heads, of their blood warming towards 
the beauty of the world about them, of their 
imagination and their sense of form inter- 
preting their religion and their life. It was 
their overruling endeavor for expressing 
their adoration and their social feeling — a 
product of the thought and feeling of their 
race, however they may have adopted some 
technical method from contemporaries com- 
ing to them across the sea. 

Waterfarers brought works from Crete, an 
island whose folk were doubtless leaders 
among these -ZEgeans. Also from Tigris- 
Euphrates states. They brought crafts out 
of the south, Egypt. Methods of various 
workers seafarers brought to the childlike 
forerunners of the Greeks, and the early peo- 
ples took them into their life, — the technic of 
the eastern and southern artisan, ways of 
fashioning in clay and metal, carving and en- 
graving stones, the Egyptians' spirals and 
rosettes and masques, and the Assyrian four- 
spoked wheel of solar light and eternity — that 
equilateral cross which we moderns call the 
Greek cross. 

So the iEgean child grew and waxed 
strong in spirit and the grace of God was 



^GEANS FORERUNNING THE GREEKS 29 

upon him. But he always remained master 
of his dedication to art. From the grossly 
rich civilization of the Syrian coast sea- 
farers, smitten with a strangely un-Semitic 
love of the sea, might enter his settlement, in 
the pellucid water that washed his land might 
gather shells for their Phoenician purple dye, 
might cut timber for shipbuilding in his 
forest, and mine silver and copper in his 
earth. They might scatter engraved gems 
and bring in wares to exchange for raw prod- 
uce of his land. Still the child was lord and 
used the activities of his civilization for his 
own development. His works were funda- 
mental, racial, and not in the spirit of a bor- 
rower. They were common to his own 
world. 

The culture and craft embodied in and set 
forth by the works of this people went vari- 
ously through Europe — to rugged natives of 
northern forests, and of the then dark and 
mysterious region beyond — to the Baltic 
itself, from which the traders brought south 
the sea's amber, tears, it was later current, 
of the sister Heliades after they became 
graceful poplars, tears wept lamenting their 
brother , Phaethon. The traders penetrated 



30 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

even beyond the Baltic of transparent waters 
to what is now Sweden. 

In these earlier centuries, we say, before the 
god-eomrading, heroic age of the Hellenes, the 
.iEgean sea was alive with keen sailors from 
Crete, blood-allies of the Greek mainland 
dwellers, and alive, also, with Phoenicians 
coming and going to various lands, carrying 
their activities as far as Britain and its mines, 
coasting outside the straits joining the Medi- 
terranean to the Atlantic, perhaps round 
Africa, and possibly adventuring to the very 
continent of America. In its homecoming 
from the west the sea-borne trade may have 
brought tin for bronze castings — bronze good 
for weapons of the warrior and for adorning 
himself and his house. From the east these 
sailors, whether ^Egean or Semitic wealth- 
seekers, fetched not alone works of older civi- 
lizations looking to westward outlet — gem-en- 
graving, gold-working, purple-dyeing, textile 
fabrics, embroideries. From those latitudes 
they brought also tale and idol of god and 
goddess, cults of the world's order and dis- 
order which those dwellers in what was to be 
Hellas took to themselves, and in the unroll- 
ing centuries naturalized and humanized and 



^GEANS FORERUNNING THE GREEKS 31 

so suffused with their feeling that the foreign 
distortion was at last difficult to trace. Thus 
was the young race tutoring itself and seiz- 
ing upon all the world of its time could offer. 

In some such eager and industrious life as 
this the vast content of Hellenic art had slow 
centuries of earth-born life. At these times 
were the art's germination and cotyledonous 
outshoot. There was an upspringing vigor, 
and then for centuries a falling away, but the 
art had always the later Greek independence 
and grace in its incipient spirit. Fragments 
of its beginnings form to-day the sole, surviv- 
ing material of swarming generations and 
their handiwork through the hundreds of 
years those generations lived. 

From its modeling in terra cotta and metal 
work, and also porcelain, this upreaching, 
pre-Greek civilization is estimated to have had 
an early splendor in Crete by the middle of 
the third millennium, and also a renewal 
about one thousand years later, a renewal, 
that is, about 1500 before Christ. But dates 
are uncertain. 

In later centuries of this progress the over- 
lord housed his power in walls of gigantic 
build, and upon a height or perhaps command- 



32 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

ing a pass for the purpose of levying taxes. 
Approach to the palace might so lead that an 
assailant presented his right, unshielded side. 
Heavy doors admitted to the house. Within, 
especially of the great hall where noble and 
retinue met at the seat of public counsel, the 
walls shone with bronze plates, colored stones 
and paintings, and possibly with alabaster 
and glass. When in richest form, the build- 
ing had upper stories and light-wells, water 
pipes, bathrooms and drains. All details 
witness that it was a spontaneous product 
suited to joint life of fighter and vassal and 
household, and that its dwellers wished to give 
to the daily exercise of life elegance and 
charm. 

Then as now the best work of the day 
wrought warfare weapons — they with un- 
erring art, we with the infinite resources of 
our science. Then as now women of rich 
families lived a life often parasitic and 
guarded. They dwelt in the best-fortified 
part of the house. Fostered in plenty they 
clad themselves in garments of gleaming 
linen and soft woolens stained purple by the 
famous sea shell. Perhaps they passed their 
days in embroidering their wear and in weav- 



^GEANS FORERUNNING THE GREEKS 33 

ing tapestries. To enhance their natural 
looks they adorned themselves with the 
golden headtire, armbands, rings and ear- 
rings at the craftsmanship of which we 
marvel. 

Their estimate of life and of the beautiful 
this folk signified in the care of their dead. 
As a part of the universal life, they must per- 
sist after death. Their future life prolonged 
their present, and those who lived in the 
splendor of the great hall craved like abode in 
the life to come. Clothing the bodies for 
eternity, they laid their dead in massive 
vaults in a hillside. To the burial they 
brought astonishing treasure. The soul and 
its felicity survivors must support and pre- 
serve. Within the tomb, when it served for 
a cult to ancestral dead, an altar or some con- 
duit offered the blood of sacrifices, honey, oil 
or other food by which the shades might 
strengthen. 1 Because of these tenders the 

1 This old pre-Greek faith in food-offering to invig- 
orate the dead was maintained far through Greek cen- 
turies. In classic Athens, at the feast of the Anthes- 
teria, was the "offering of pots" when the people set 
forth all kinds of seeds to souls of ancestors, invoking 
fertility through their spirits called back from the other 
world by the seeming upward trend of life in spring. 



34 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

dead remained stable friends of the living 
and gave them counsel. 

Presumably the people dwelling near the 
palace were in some sort of feudal pledge to 
the family of the great house and the tomb. 
Countless thousands of workers must have 
labored at bridge, roadway and drainage 
building, in grain-field, in olive culture, in 
vineyard, in cattle-shed, at the loom, at pot- 
ters* wheel, at bronze smelting vessel and 
mold, at the spit, at the mill and bread oven 
of the great house, for their sustenance. Of 
these myriads upon myriads of toilers 
throughout untold generations supporting the 

Graves at Athens, down to their third century before 
Christ, show the dead were provided with food and wine. 
Unquestionably the practice went on later. 

To-day the significant custom of such offering is 
broadly practiced. In Greece food and wine are now 
buried with those who, as Homer sang, "sleep the brazen 
sleep," and for three years "the unsleeping lamp" is 
kept burning by the grave. Among other peoples, in 
parts of Lithuania for instance, peasants to this day 
set viands beside the graves of their kin. Lately, in the 
city of New York, a housemaid daily put aside a plate 
of food to strengthen the spirit of her brother, who 
some weeks before had died at her family home in Ire- 
land. The Chinese of Chicago, keeping their "Feast 
of the Dead," set baskets of roast pig, chicken, duck, 



jEGEANS forerunning the greeks 35 

palace family and retinue, and of their liv- 
ing, we have remains in bronze hairpins, 
knives, rings, brooches, double-headed axes, 
spearheads, figures of men, women and 
chariots — offered and dedicated at shrines, 
for they had no temples — in figurines of 
stone, ivory, faience and other material from 
their burying grounds. But the people en- 
dure chiefly in the altruism of their works 
made in obedience to the power of the nobles. 
"They maintained the fabric of their world. 
And in the handiwork of their craft was their 
prayer. ' ' Their Mother Earth of which they 
claimed to be the children absorbed their 

salted meats and fish, watermelon seeds, cakes and other 
food by the graves of their countrymen buried there. 
And faith in the abiding of souls of the dead in 
places of burial of the body has appreciably affected 
life in our own country. Belief that the soul waited 
the Resurrection Morning in its body's resting place (a 
belief migrating from England with generations in man- 
hood with Shakespeare) — such folk-feeling kept many a 
New England family from "moving west" as a whole. 
A conviction, feeling rather than any reasoned-out state- 
ment, was broad-spread — that of the duty of some mem- 
ber of the family to stay by the relatives' graves in the 
old farm, or village burying-ground, to keep dutiful 
companionship with parents, sister, child, and finally to 
join them in the same consecrated soil. This sentiment 



36 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

bodies, and may hap the immortality of them 
rested in their Underworld. 

That consciousness of a mysterious, vitaliz- 
ing force in nature which was, for centuries 
uniting with another people's faith, to pro- 
duce the exquisite religious personifications 
of the heroic age, that religious instinct to 
draw the divine to one's self and explain 
motion of life in bodies of sky or earth by 
conceiving an unseen spirit dwelling in the 
object, informed the soul of this people. A 
matriarchal religion had sway. The Prin- 

seems to imply the faith that an invisible soul, gifted 
with consciousness, abode near the grave and was grati- 
fied by the association. 

The sentiment of the iEgean folk of the bronze age 
that the soul dwelt in the grave and in the remains of 
the living form, had a logical outcome we are apt to 
overlook : that therefore from the bones might be gained 
a grace of spirit that had originally dwelt in the living 
person. Here doubtless arose the ascription of power 
to the bones of a notable person, a faith surviving to 
later Greek centuries. Bones of Orestes, for instance, 
were removed to Sparta in historic times in order to 
attract the soul of the hero and help the state to victori- 
ous arms. With such faith was united belief in an 
actual physical effluence, a healing virtue passing to per- 
sons and things by contact, the worship of "relics," a 
sentiment entertained among us to-day. 



.EGEANS FORERUNNING THE GREEKS 37 

ciple ruling in their smiling land, the mystery 
of fecund nature, they personified as a 
woman. To her unwed was subordinated a 
son of whom she became the mother by im- 
maculate conception. The earth in divers 
forms and phases expressed their Great God- 
dess — Eeproductive Fertility, mother of all 
living things, a Maiden, but with the seed and 
bearing harvests she became Mother. Other 
emblems of fertility and generation, such as 
the bull-man, and snake goddess, doubtless 
represented minor gods. Symbolic objects, 
such as horns, trees, axes, crosses and pillars 
were common in Crete. It is believed no 
sacerdotalism prevailed. The lord of the 
stronghold may have been high-priest. From 
women as ministrants probably descended 
legends of the Amazons. Every settlement 
of that iEgean folk had its rites in which its 
dutiful people praised and worshiped "Our 
Lady" — Mother Earth and their land's meed 
of corn and fruitfulness. The goddess lived 
into Greek centuries. In Athens she became 
tutelary in the form of the maiden Pallas 
Athene, and in other places in forms of 
Artemis, Aphrodite, Here. At Eleusis she 
remained Demeter, Earth Mother. Under 



38 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

other names faith in her and usage of her 
fertility figure, as of her of the many breasts 
at Ephesus, persisted to Christian centuries, 
and still to-day persist in Mediterranean 
countries. 

United with this matriarchal religion there 
is supposed to have been, at least in the 
earlier centuries of the period, a domestic 
life in which house property belonged to the 
women of the family, and descended from 
mother to daughter; in relationship the 
father not being reckoned ; sons and brothers 
going off to serve and marry women who had 
land in other communities. 

Thus many fertile, diligent hundreds of 
years, — iEgean, pre-Greek — seem to have 
unrolled. The people's early civilization 
pressed onward. Eemains of their life would 
testify that they were a peace-loving folk. 
But those who first fought with knife of 
stone, and bow and arrow, had come to use 
lance and dagger and sword in taking life of 
human opponent, or in leading him to the en- 
slavement of the subdued. The evolution of 
such an armory needs many generations. 

But with that feeling upward or outward, 
perhaps a forerunner of that sense of race 



^GEANS FORERUNNING THE GREEKS 39 

vocation of which the oncoming Greeks were 
to be conscious, a new and definite order was 
slowly prevailing. During centuries some 
power had been disturbing the ant-like set- 
tlements over those broadly separated lands. 
Their poise was gradually changing. The 
life-habits of the old people, a people of dis- 
tinct and rational customs whose influence 
would long outlast their overthrow and react 
against their conquerors, were passing. A 
new folk was coming uppermost, a ruling peo- 
ple doubtless dominant by right of conquest. 
They possessed a metal through which they 
forged forward. The age of the use of iron 
was beginning. 

In endless iteration and through thou- 
sands of years a tale has told itself — of peo- 
ples of the north, obedient to the never-dying 
longing of northerners for the south, send- 
ing toward the sun wave after wave of their 
children, and conquering. They hold the 
strength of conquest for a brief day, and then 
their domination melts in the warmth for 
whose gifts they left their rugged seats. 
Those subdued, often of more material ideas 
than the conquerors, reassert themselves by 
absorbing their victors' blood. The lords 



40 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

overcome with the luxury of conquest, forget- 
ful of the idealism or quest of power that 
made them conquerors, far outnumbered and 
outweighed by their subjects, die out like 
all aristocracies, or are lost in amalgama- 
tion. 

Undoubtedly golden-haired Teutons, whom 
the ancients called Celts, a mobile, surging, 
energetic folk, loving dominion and the order- 
ing of dominion, sought ^Egean lands and 
seized upon and in part energized, in part 
wiped out, the old civilization, the old peace- 
lovers. The northerners bore their arts with 
them. Such equipage of life as the heroic 
kings of Homer's song have in our time been 
unearthed in Bosnia, in Styria, in Carniola 
and other countries — armor, weapons and 
adornment and sepulture indicating the faith 
of Homer's Achasans. 

In other words, during many centuries 
these .ZEgean peoples were evolving their 
characteristic art and life, bands of fair- 
haired folk clustering perhaps even to the 
shores of the northern ocean had turned 
obedient to the call of the south, and again 
and again had pressed into the regions 
lighted and warmed by the sun and JEgean 



.EGEANS FORERUNNING THE GREEKS 41 

waters. These tribes of the northern and 
central regions of Europe, primitive, political 
communities, subject to no law but loyalty to 
the community and obedience to the com- 
munity's power, were organized for collective 
and almost perpetual pugnacity. Among 
them chronic warfare, by a process of selec- 
tion, weeded out the less energetic and pro- 
duced the most war-loving and terrible 
fighters the world has ever seen. A naming 
of certain spiritual qualities of theirs is worth 
impress upon our memory for we shall meet 
their Germanic characteristics directing 
Greek life in succeeding times— fundamental 
considerations of conscientious conduct, a 
puritan rigor, and a genius for social organi- 
zation. 

Those were the days of the uprootings of 
peoples. The mountains which practically 
cap the southlands the adventurers of fortune 
swept over, bearing oftentimes with them 
the broad-skulled, brown-complexioned men 
dwelling on the mountains. Becoming mas- 
ters of a part of the vine-country of the 
-ZEgean, and of its richness, they asserted 
their lordship. At the end of the slaughter 
of defending men, the invaders took the 



42 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

women and children of the settlements they 
had disrupted and formed a new home, 
leaders of the freebooters marrying the 
daughters, or wives, of the native lords. 

The northerners had brought with them 
their patriarchal rule subversive of the old 
matrilineal system, and their traditions of 
marriage. Also their northern energy, their 
spirit of order and of government, and so 
virile and ingratiating an Aryan speech that 
they implanted it in their chosen abodes and 
within the use of the conquered people. They 
brought also love of the lay, and the bard 
to make and sing the saga. These people we 
call Achseans. Their consciousness was des- 
tined to form one wing of that uranic spirit 
we call Greek. Zeus, sky-father, god of the 
heavens was theirs, and also shining Apollo, 
the sun. Such divinities succeeded as dom- 
inating gods the old iEgean deity, Pro- 
ductive Nature, the embodying of the su- 
preme soul in Mother Earth and in minor 
gods and symbols. 

These events happened when the culture of 
the pre-Hellenic iEgeans, the hypothetic 
evolution of which we have bespoken, was at 
its height. In the great epic age to which 



^EGEANS FORERUNNING THE GREEKS 43 

we are coming, we hear of the yellow-haired 
rulers called Achaeans, of their tall stature, 
of their round shields and bronze greaves 
and hauberks, of their brooches and other 
body ornaments, of their use of iron, of the 
burning of their dead — all evidencing a cul- 
ture different from and independent of the 
^Egean. 

A people other than the early tribes of the 
Greek lands had made their way into that 
country set aside for a splendid development 
of the human spirit, and themselves master 
of its population. In this way doubtless 
came into being the age of the dominant 
Achaeans, feudal lords dwelling, as lords 
dwelt at the end of the pre-Greek age, their 
citadel a palace set on a windy height, or in 
a mountain pass, their vassals and the people 
they had conquered, the people who swelled 
their following, dwelling in outlying plain 
and meadow. 

With the new race established in Greece 
came the use of iron, Doubtless with iron 
fully developed came more contention, strife, 
the warlike mood which weapons of the metal 
support and which was doubtless still in the 
hearts of the migrators. 



HEROIC AGE OF THE GREEKS 



Warum waren die aufgeklarten Grieclien in der Welt? 
Weil sie da waren und unter solchen Umstanden nicht 
anders als aufgeklarte Griechen seyn konnten. — Herder, 
in Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit. 

There is wisdom and depth in the philosophy which 
always considers the origin and the germ, and glories in 
history as one constant epic. . . . 

The demonstration of the advance of knowledge and 
the development of ideas . . . are the charter of prog- 
ress and the vital spark of history. — Lord Acton, in 
A Lecture on the Study of History. 

The study of classical literature is probably on the 
decline; but whatever may be the fate of this study in 
general, it is certain that . . . attention will be more 
and more directed to the poetry of Homer . . . 

Homer should be approached ... in the simplest 
frame of mind possible. Modern sentiment tries to 
make the ancient not less than the modern world its 
own; but against modern sentiment in its applications 
to Homer the translator, if he would feel Homer truly 
. . . cannot be too much on his guard. — Matthew 
Arnold, in On Translating Homer. 



46 



HEROIC AGE OF THE GREEKS 

We are already within the heroic age of 
Hellas, an age sung and written of as no other 
single period in the world's history — an age 
that stood to later Hellas somewhat as the 
age of old Germanic epics stands to modern 
Germanic peoples. From now on we have 
the people we may refer to as Greek, or Hel- 
lenes. They were already, even in this 
earlier time, so far racially characterized as 
to show a specific difference between them- 
selves and any other stock. 

To comprehend them we must set aside our 
daily habits of feeling, orienting our minds 
to their point of view. We must readjust 
whatever world-weary emotional and intel- 
lectual phases we may have. We can ap- 
proach them only by saturating our con- 
sciousness with their early and elemental 
vigor and their imaginative curiosity and joy. 

At the very beginning of their recorded 
history we find the old Greek what for us 
he has always remained — a rational creature 
and the representative of a rational civiliza- 

47 



48 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

tion. He already loved tlie splendor of the 
world, its brilliance, its beauty. He bad an 
exalted joy in living. He revered the hu- 
man form and the individual being of whom 
that form was a part. He already had a 
sense of symmetry, moderation. His art he 
had already planted in the laws of the beauti- 
ful, as his life in the laws of reason. His 
qualities and his circumstances agreed and 
he had the inevitable offspring, joyous, opti- 
mistic harmony. 

Within Hellas, then, and with conditions 
already set forth, was inaugurated the age 
we call the Greek epic. In the pages of 
Homer we view its magnificent panorama. 
The genuineness of the old poet's record as 
to events and sources is of least importance. 
His realism vouches for his absolute delinea- 
tion of life and manners. His tales of Troy 
and the heroes and heroines about the town 
had been handed down among his fellow 
Ionians, by legend of mouth and by song, 
long before his genius composed the match- 
less epic singing the ways of gods to men, 
and his immortal voice first chanted his lays. 
Homer came at the end of a period, at the 
twilight of a long day. 



RELIGION OF NATURE AND THE GROUP 49 

To characterize an age we must consider 
it under the heads of religion, polity, moral 
ideas and art. These are the peculiar prod- 
ucts of the spirit of a race — like flora and 
fauna they are determined by soil and 
climate. They can not be borrowed, as may 
industry and applied science, without loss of 
character. 

Through thousands of years of the stone 
and bronze ages progenitors of the Hellenes 
had been evoking the pantheon of Greece 
from the phenomena of nature — from the 
fruitful energy of the soil, the processions of 
the seasons, the shining expanse of the all- 
encompassing sky, the virgin splendor of the 
air, the "all-seeing cyclic sun," the cavern- 
ous darkness of the underworld, the ever- 
sleepless stream of ocean. Early peoples had 
stood mystified, revering these appearances 
before they personified them. 1 All was God 
to this young humanity passing from the 
race's childhood. 

1 The imaginative and poetic mind of the American 
Indian had this quality. "The red man prefers to be- 
lieve that the Spirit of God is not breathed into man 
alone, but that the whole created universe is a sharer in 
the immortal perfection of its maker." — Dr. Charles 
Alexander Eastman in The Soul of the Indian. 



50 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

As to a child to-day inert things had per- 
sonal attributes. A spirit indwelling under 
the surface came to the sight of men — in per- 
sonal forms and as separate and varied as 
the phenomena of nature. To their loving 
awe all manifested God — green forests, 
laughing valleys. Every mountain peak, 
cave, wind-swept plain and ridge was quick 
with the divine. An oak might be the home 
of a god, as at Dodona, and his hallowed 
voice heard from its leaves and trunk. Dry- 
ads haunted woods, and nymphs half -divine 
yet not deathless animated poplar, pine, 
laurel, olive, fig-tree, the plane, from their 
birth in the forest — not only trees but reeds, 
hyacinths and other growths. And when the 
day came for the growth to perish, its soul 
fled from the light of the sun. Water itself 
had a divinity, the fertility borne by a bub- 
bling spring or a leaping brook, a spirit or 
naiad. Looking with the imaginative eye, 
the Hellenes saw gods in swelling and bene- 
factive rivers, and in the stream that sinks 
below the surface and reappears after flow- 
ing underground. Their conceptions they 
humanized till the grace and beauty and 
frolic of the beings became real, not an ab- 



RELIGION OF NATURE AND THE GROUP 51 

straction. Nereids and Tritons coming from 
the sea blew wreathed horns. The pan-psy- 
chism of certain philosophers of to-day, a 
vitalizing of nature, claim of the existence 
of a world-soul in even lowest forms of 
nature, a theory of the non-human nature en- 
joying an interior life — such a faith was the 
basis of the Hellene's anthropomorphizing 
tendency. 

This primitive god-maker amazed, in won- 
der before natural causes and gifted with 
keen senses and lively imagination, feeling in 
his heart that man is the highest expression 
of nature, fancied creatures like himself, but 
larger and more powerful than he, must be 
behind those appearances. He had not yet 
become enough of a metaphysician to inquire 
into the grounds of the sacred awe with 
which the living forces of a mysterious world 
inspired him. When his lucid intelligence 
clothed these forces and the whole body of 
nature in human form, he gave evidence that 
he found in them his own spirit, that he 
was not alien to the all-life, and he recog- 
nized his kinship with the world. He 
showed that in his day and country, man no 
longer cowered before the powers of nature 



52 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

as tilings incomprehensible and strange, a 
mystery apart from himself. 

Even the discriminating reason of man the 
Hellene came to view as a natural phenom- 
enon, and as a militant and aggressive prin- 
ciple personified it in the gray-eyed daugh- 
ter of Zeus, Pallas Athene; in its loftier 
prophetic and aesthetic functions in shining 
Apollo. And the social unity which formed 
the hearth by which he sat in homely com- 
fort he enshrined as a goddess. Zeus him- 
self, the god of the bright aether, son of the 
Ancient of Days — not the Eternal, the Abid- 
ing God— was also god of man's upward-striv- 
ing spirit. 2 

Seers and prophets of the race, "medicine- 
men' ? some writers of to-day delight to name 
them, had shaped certain gods in dim out- 
line in far-back ages, in the Urzeit of the Hel- 
lenes and their kindred peoples. Outlines of 

2 A present-day evangel speaking of "the ideal power 
with which we feel ourselves in connection, the 'God' of 
ordinary men," curiously re-echoes Greek conceptions. 
"We can experience union with something larger than 
ourselves and in that union find our greatest peace," 
wrote Mr. James in "The Varieties of Religious Experi- 
ence." "This something need not be infinite, it need not 
be solitary. It might conceivably be only a larger and 



RELIGION OF NATURE AND THE GROUP 53 

sundry Greek gods existed in the pantheon 
of races akin to the Greeks. Apollo, the 
sun-god, Zeus-pater, sky-father and some- 
times spirit of fertility, were common to 
many. 3 But the divinities were amorphous; 
they had no definite lines or ethical qualities. 
The peculiar product of the imagination of 
the early day of the Greeks was the definite, 
vigorous, vivid, human-like, living forms of 
their gods — their bringing the divine element 
within the comprehension of their folk-mind, 
their ensouling mysteries of nature and of 
man's spirit in human form. 

As their civilization advanced the early 
personifications of the race, as would happen 

more godlike self . . . and the universe might conceiv- 
ably be a collection of such selves. . . . Thus would a 
sort of polytheism return upon us. ... I think, in fact, 
that a final philosophy of religion will have to recon- 
sider the pluralistic hypothesis more seriously than it 
has hitherto been willing to consider it." The eminent 
naturalist, Alfred Russel Wallace, has set forth a not 
unsimilar conception as "in harmony with the universal 
teaching of Nature." 

3 "First there is the earth, and the sun, and the stars, 
and the whole universe, and the goodly order of the sea- 
sons, and the divisions into years and months; and that 
all Hellenes and barbarians alike consider them to be 
gods," wrote Plato in his "Laws." 



54 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

from the associative laws of mind, grew 
more and more in definite human attributes — 
in the veins of the exalted physical beings 
ichor, not blood, would flow, and rather than 
the pleasures of mortals' offerings, they 
would enjoy their own peculiar food of nec- 
tar and ambrosia. And in the process of 
making the conception personal and genial — 
in the humanizing metamorphosis, the form- 
ing an ideal of humanity — divinities would 
gain a history, which is to say the popular 
mind would endow them with action and 
passion. If we recall that the Greeks' gods 
had natural appetites, we must also remem- 
ber that natural appetites were regarded by 
that people whose life was moderated with 
awe for limit and horror at exaggeration and 
impiety, whose axioms of moral and physical 
self -limitation became laws of conduct quoted 
for centuries and to this day — natural appe- 
tites were regarded more noble by those an- 
cient children of out-of-doors and out-door 
phenomena than by peoples to-day. Hand 
in hand with their anthropomorphism com- 
monly went ethical promptings against ex- 
cess. 

The dim, great might of nature shines 



RELIGION OF NATURE AND THE GROUP 55 

through the radiant forms of Homer's gods. 
But in his heroes, too, we feel the pulsing of 
those very powers. Both gods and men are 
the children of one unsearchable source of 
life. Mysticism, enthusiasm, penance, have 
no place in this world. Man adores his 
radiant ideals as naturally as he gladdens in 
the light of the sun. There is no sense of 
sin — haunting consciousness of moral imper- 
fection and apartness from God. Eyes are 
fixed on this world and the heroic Hellenes 
are face to face with the invisible. 

In their joyous sense of life, psyche, (poxy 
or soul, receded. The active and actual ab- 
sorbed them. Peoples of the north in cli- 
matic pressure of frost and fog, and forced to 
long periods of inaction, found vent of energy 
in introspection which brought immortal- 
ity near. Not so the early Hellene. Ionia 
which produced his epic song had the softest 
and mildest climate of all Greece, said 
Herodotus. The sun stirring the Hellene's 
purple sea, and impelling his broad-bosomed 
earth to her bounty, lifted him out of imagin- 
ings about another life, and made his after 
world a shadowy thing. His soul would cross 
Oceanus or Styx in its passage to the "cold" 



56 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

and "mouldering" kingdom of the dead, Ere- 
bus, ruled over by Hades and Persephone. 
There among the "people of the earth' ' his 
life would be a spectral copy of what he found 
here. 

These people often burned their dead, in 
this custom perhaps preserving the needs of 
the early northern migrators, who, passing 
through densely wooded countries, must burn 
in order to preserve the body from outrage 
and dishonoring mutilation. For because of 
the possessions the marauders had seized, the 
resident folk would be fiercely vindictive. 
Then too there were the devouring creatures 
of the wild. 

The burning of the body shows the idea 
prevailed of a separate abode for the spirit. 
The soul will never return to its earthly sub- 
stance. But until the burning it flits between 
its late dwelling and the invisible world be- 
low. Fire, the purifier, immaterial matter, 
detaches the soul from its corporeal cover and 
bears it to yonder world. "Thou dost 
sleep, Achilles, and hast forgotten me," 
cries the soul of the beloved Patroclus; "not 
in my life but in my death hast thou been 
unmindful of me. Bury me that I may pass 



RELIGION OF NATURE AND THE GROUP 57 

the gates of Hades, when thou hast given me 
my due of fire. ' ' The slaying of twelve Tro- 
jan youths at the funeral rites of Patroclus 
may have been a survival of the faith, to 
which we have already referred, of strength- 
ening with blood a soul that had passed to 
the infernal deities. 

To the Elysian fields and ends of the earth 
the gods translated a favored few, " where 
golden-haired Ehadamanthus dwells, where 
life is easiest for mortals ; no falling snows 
there, nor lingering winter, nor storm, but 
ever the airs of the western wind breathing 
softly to lift the souls of men." 

The soul as well as the body of the Greeks 
is in their myths of the gods. To the plastic 
genius of those Hellenes more than to any 
other people the world was alive. To them, 
because of their active minds, their creative 
energy, the vigor of their imagination, it was 
given more than others to stamp their race 
spirit and genius upon early products. Al- 
ready in Homer the Greeks were idealists. 

Approach to the great gods was open to 
all by sacrifice and prayer — that is, by gift 
and petition. Each human child might come 
direct to his divinities, calling by name upon 



58 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

that god whose help he felt he needed. The 
offering was a bribe, not so much in thanks 
for favors past, but as even now among the 
more primitive-minded of us, a gift to change 
the holy one's hostility to the petitioner's 
desires. Prayer was to him an asking. Lift- 
ing cleansed hands and arms frankly to 
heaven in manner of a petitioner, the Greeks 
prayed standing. No servile genuflexion, no 
oriental salaam prostrated his body. His 
sense of human worth permitted no abnega- 
tion nor concealing himself with a veil in the 
presence of his divinity. The Hellenes found 
no opposition to a supreme power in their 
fresh, god-given life, and needed no mediator 
between themselves and the infinite. 

No sacerdotal caste flourished. There were 
indeed servants of the gods who declared the 
gods' will to men. Probably their service 
had evolved from the magic-efforts of the 
earlier wonder-worker or medicine-man. But 
now the servants spoke through the gift of a 
God-consciousness clearer than that of other 
men's — that was the ground of the reverence 
borne him — not by the privilege of a caste. 
Certain families possessed the exclusive exer- 
cise of certain rites, and occasional priests 



RELIGION OF NATURE AND THE GROUP 59 

and priestesses had the keepers' charge of 
temples and chanted liturgies. The office of 
these men and women was sacred, but their 
persons only when engaged in the service of 
the shrine. Association between shrines was 
not organized, and the priests never came 
to the strength of a corporate union. They 
were not given an esoteric training that set 
them mentally apart from their people. It 
is evident that they were not ordained to their 
function by any elaboration. They had small 
compelling influence. They had no entrance 
to the private life of the family. They were 
not guiders of women or teachers of youth. 
They were not necessary in war. They were 
not theologians — the poet or rhapsodist was 
that. Even in this epic age the Greek guarded 
his intellectual independence. 

Thus the Greek of the heroic age lived in 
a world of mysterious origin made beautiful 
and near to him by the companionship of 
splendid, immortal gods. They gave him all 
fair things — wisdom, righteousness, courage, 
beauty, food, well-being. Unrestrained re- 
ligious feeling saturated his every task, every 
joy, every institution of life. The immortal 
was ever near to " start upon the soul in 



60 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

sweet surprises. ' ' " All men need the gods, ' ' 
said Homer. Their power was a shield be- 
tween the Hellene and the inscrutable forces 
from which he and they had sprung. They 
were a defense from ill. They fought in 
men's battles and guided men's voyagings. 
Without their help nothing could prosper. 
Men and gods belonged to a common society. 
All wrought for a common end. Their powers 
differed. The immortals, like the people's 
group life, were deathless. 

Gods found it sweet and no loss of honor 
or dignity to accept human reverence and 
homage, and to share men's feasts and men's 
sports. In return for their bounty mortals 
venerated the gods and offered them gifts and 
food. Immortals in a presence shared every 
meal. This might have been, doubtless was, 
a survival of a usage from primitive times 
when, since food is the main support of life, 
sacraments took the form of a meal. 

Every slaughter was an offering and every 
meal a feast with a god. The ways of 
human kind were good for the gods' associ- 
ation and the earth for them to go about upon. 
They loved the community. Without the 
gods ' membership the group is not thinkable. 



RELIGION OF NATURE AND THE GROUP 61 

Nor were the gods without the group's 
loyalty. 

Lordly ancestors the gods were often es- 
teemed — broadly, in evolutionary view, that 
in fact they were, a product of the com- 
munity's spirit and in reaction the commu- 
nity of the gods' — and their interest in the 
lives of men might lie in their character of 
progenitors. "Father Zeus!" often cries 
Homer, "Father of men and immortals!" 
And centuries after this heroic epic, Pindar 
sang of the race of gods and men, "from one 
mother we both draw breath of life. ' ' Plato 
later still embodied these conceptions when 
he wrote, "Wise men say that one community 
embraces heaven and earth and gods and men 
and friendship and order and temperance 
and righteousness, and for that reason they 
call this whole a universe. ' ' 

What a luster it cast upon the race to be 
the children — not the creatures — of their di- 
vinities! The mysterious tie of nature and 
of the community, older even than the gods, 
bound gods and men together. Gods and 
men formed an organized social unit. Duties 
to, and rights of, men factored as well as 
duties to and right ways toward gods. We 



62 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

must enter into the sentiment deeply if we 
would realize the loftiest elements of the 
heroic consciousness. 

Such was the heroic Greeks' religion — a 
nexus of imagination and feeling and thought, 
rudimentary, wrought out by race wonder- 
workers, race thinkers and race poets; a 
growth, we must remember, before recorded 
history, one of those instances in evolution 
when sound conclusions come from false 
premises, a more perfect form unexpectedly 
develops from the imperfect. It was old and 
taking on decay even at Homer's singing. 
In its substance we have the race's sense of 
beauty, their feeling of the closeness of na- 
ture — its very parenthood to them — the 
effervescing imagination of the one who sees 
the world anew, and the foreshadowing grop- 
ing for the moral solution of life with which 
the Hellenes ' later works were so completely 
saturated. Studying this early religion 
sympathetically, we see how in the radiant, 
dissolving forms of immortals the very emo- 
tions and ideas of our religious feeling of to- 
day — feeling which we are now apt to chain 
under the hardened crust of dogma — then 
played generously and freely. A spirit sin- 



THE STATE 63 

gle, omniscient, omnipotent, inaccessible, too 
remote for his intimacies and communion was 
afar from the Greek's conception. 

The heroic Greek's state was nothing dis- 
tinct from his religion. It was the rule of a 
king, or feudal lord or chief of clan. Per- 
haps he was a son of a god, or of a strange, 
strong man from the north. Socially he may 
have been descended from a primitive prac- 
ticer of magic or other religious office for the 
benefit of the group. If his evolution were 
such, in making it he had needed to be able, 
acute, acquisitive of authority and riches, re- 
alizing the force he had acquired through 
prestige of knowledge of the divine and ca- 
pable of carrying that prestige to politics. 
Whatever his growth, he was esteemed more 
nearly descended from Poseidon or Zeus than 
his people. The subject mass could not have 
such legends of descent. Therefore tradi- 
tions in later times would conflict; voicing 
the old ^Egean people they would speak of 
"earth-born men," again of men as sons of 
the chief god or as creatures of Prometheus. 
The genuine Greek creed is doubtless that 
which makes the ancestor of the race a son 
of Zeus. 



64 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

Thus it came that the divine chief, or king, 
was an oracle of justice — Homer said he had 
a Zeus-given scepter — and the source of 
authority in preserving the principles and 
laws custom had established. But among the 
Hellenes this prestige could not degenerate 
into an absolutism. Gods themselves were 
not infallible ; much less their sons. The tra- 
ditions of the race, and precedent of the law, 
the utterance of their prophets, and will of 
the council of elders and of the whole people 
were forces not to be set aside by the royal 
word. We behold the heroic Greek even in 
war deliberating upon their common interest, 
the people present and expressing their ap- 
proval or disapproval — the germ of their 
democracy to come. Even then it was Greek 
to be master of one's situation, of one's self; 
nothing must be withdrawn altogether from 
the determination of common reason. The 
Greeks' religious consciousness posits as a 
necessity for all time political independence. 
Zeus took away half of a man's virtue when 
days of slavery laid hold of him, said Homer. 

Every government is founded upon an 
original democracy. That later analyst of 
Greek polities, Aristotle, conceived the origin 



THE STATE 65 

of the Greek monarchy in a reward to some 
well-worker of the people, out of loyalty con- 
tinued to his offspring. In Homeric song 
the king was king by the free consent of the 
governed, whether he was lord of a city of 
rural habits, or chief of a more open valley 
clan. His functions were not arbitrary. 
Eather his strength was indefinite — uncon- 
fined by limits. His constitutional rights, his 
headship founded on social sentiment, phys- 
ical as well as mental prowess must support. 
He represented the collective action and emo- 
tion of his people before the gods and offered 
prayer at a large sacrifice — a tribal meal 
with some god. He was leader in war. For 
such services he received tributes of cattle, 
the honor part of the booty, a portion of 
land, and other rich gifts. His council of 
elders was of men reputable and experienced, 
already past the age of the flourishing war- 
rior. They sat at meat with the king, ad- 
vised with him upon the common weal and 
with him determined disputes about property 
— mainly property because thievery caught 
in the act met punishment by death without 
trial, and the revenge of murder lay with the 
family. 



66 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

The state in this stage of the national life 
had not been the subject of reflection and had 
no formulated object. It was doubtless a 
growth from primitive groupings for pro- 
tection, a loosely united clan, a free union of 
the people, rather than a working, ordered, 
corporate thing, — an order justified by the 
majesty of itself and the economic needs of 
the day. The rule of heroes was a necessity, 
if not for those governed, at least for the 
full manifestation of the heroic character. 

But most important for determining the 
true index of an age, namely, its conception 
of the worth of life, what things are desir- 
able, and what are their conditions: The 
Homeric Greek seldom reflected on life, but 
lived with a sense peculiar to himself. He 
could not comprehend his existence as in- 
volving any moral aim, any tragical nodus 
or complication. There was a retribution, a 
nemesis, which followed the violation of an 
ordered world, but it was external and a not 
unavoidable evil if the trespasser had but 
heroic might. Eesponsibility for wrong-do- 
ing was often laid at the door of Ate — blind, 
deluding, ruinous Folly who abode among 
men and glided with light feet over the heads 



MORAL IDEAS OF THE HOMERIC GREEKS 67 

of mortals. Wrong-doing was infatuation of 
mind — of the intellect and appealing to the 
intellect. The doer of wrong was not respon- 
sible for his deed, his mind had become dark- 
ened, he was the victim of circumstances, or 
of Ate, or other of the gods. Eight, order, 
precedent, custom, dike, dixy; she who ap- 
portions things to mortals and of whom men 
expect justice, is strong beyond hybris, fyfy^c, 
wanton violence, brute strength, lawlessness, 
disregard of the rights of others, a companion 
of surfeit. Cowardice and the want of nat- 
ural affection are shameful, and that because 
they have no force and confuse the order of 
life. 

To our view of those times, there is now 
and then uttered a melancholy upon which 
we moderns have turned glasses of analysis. 
Such lines as Homer's "The gods spun the 
thread of destiny for unhappy men to live 
grieved at heart," and "There is nothing 
more miserable than man of all that breathes 
and creeps upon the earth," sympathetically 
crystallize a sentiment alive even in early 
Hellenic faith. Such enunciations are, how- 
ever, in the proportion of one to thousands 
of adolescent delight. They are a natural 



68 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

reaction, the undertone, the low note show- 
ing how the heroic Hellenes knew the pain 
of mortal life, its baffling complexities, the 
mystery of its discords and distress. 
Homer sang the truth of his day, and sad- 
ness the truth must know. The striations 
only make the sunlight of joy that floods the 
whole heroic time all the clearer. Youth 
does not concern itself with sorrow, and mel- 
ancholy in youth is morbidity. The heroic 
Hellenes were youths. 

Again that epic "envy of the gods" of 
which the old poet sang, for instance when 
Penelope after the return of Odysseus says, 
"The gods gave us trouble, the gods jealous 
that we should abide together and joy in our 
youth and come to the threshold of old age;" 
and the gods' deception of men by false ap- 
pearances and by lies, are sentiments paral- 
leled in the primitive beliefs of other races — 
for instance in the race of Israel. The 
"envy" contains within its fable endeavors of 
youth to explain daemonic force shaping hu- 
man life, the complexity of the moral law 
which he feels and sees at work in the world 
about him, and to find his limitations and 
place within those laws — rudimentary fore- 



MORAL IDEAS OF THE HOMERIC GREEKS 69 

runners of the endeavor phrased in our Old 
Testament "walking humbly with God." 

The world to the heroic Hellene was full 
of wonders to employ the curiosity, and of 
prizes to engage the ambition of all who had 
the strength of mind to seek them. To be 
rich and strong and beautiful and wise, a 
friend of the gods, to have seen the wonders 
of distant lands and the ways of foreign men, 
were the aims of life. But this was all. 
There was no suspicion or feeling of the un- 
satisfactory character of these things. A 
simple recognition of one's talents or power 
was sufficient. Morbid self-love requiring the 
refinements of flattery and advertisement was 
to develop in a later day. There was no 
desire for self-culture nor for the convic- 
tion and consciousness of rectitude. It was 
enough if one realized one 's aim in the world. 
A man was considered a force, not a soul, a 
beautiful, heroic energy accomplishing a pas- 
sage through the world in bold and graceful 
ways. A prosperous life, well-rounded and 
crowned with years and honor, was a spectacle 
not different from the sinking of the sun and 
its majestic light to the western horizon. 
The event of a young life checked in its heroic 



70 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

course had deepest pathos because it meant 
the defeat of strength and beauty. 

Eeverent fear, aidos, acdcoz, was the very 
flower of the moral consciousness of this age. 
It is a feeling lost in Christian centuries, and 
difficult to revive even sufficiently to compre- 
hend its nature. It was the instinct of pro- 
portion, of self -limitation, which preserved 
the Greek from all excess. Through it he 
shrank from any unlimited utterance of him- 
self, not only toward his fellow men but also 
toward the divine who punish excess. This 
one sentiment was his modesty — it kept him 
to well-considered action and saved him from 
self-assertion; his piety; his awe; his loyalty 
— it saved him from desecration and boast- 
ing ; his filial and family feeling ; his honor — 
it moved him to reverence and sympathy for 
the helpless and to estimating wrong to them 
unpardonable. It was a shrinking self- 
repression evading a violation of eternal jus- 
tice, moral indignation at presumptuous deed, 
the Hellene 's recognition of the universal con- 
science and awe for those eternal guardians 
of the law of righteousness comprehended in 
the goddesses sovereign of the very gods, the 
omnipotent Moerae, Fates. Springing from 



EPIC POETRY THE AGE'S PECULIAR ART 71 

the depths of Hellenic consciousness of life 
and contemplation of life's order, aidos, rev- 
erent fear, was to the epic Greek what faith 
in the Eternal was to the Jew. It was the 
core of the Greeks' religions feeling and as 
a holy energy infused his life, his art. Aidos 
is the antithesis of hybris. 

What the art of such an age must have 
been is clear. It could not in large phases 
manifest itself in plastic ideals because it 
conceived life as significant only in its activ- 
ity. Moving impression was everything, mi- 
nute attention to the elements of things, noth- 
ing. Painting therefore could not flourish. 
Architecture subserves either the ostentation 
of despotism, the ritual of mysticism, luxury 
and opulence, or, as later in Greece, gives ex- 
pression to a sense of the beautiful so culti- 
vated by reflection that it delights in the har- 
monies of geometrical forms. Music is the 
child of meditation, the voice of the spirit con- 
sidering within itself the wonders, the joys 
and sorrows of life. Than music nothing 
could be further from the genius of heroic 
Greece. Lyric poetry is a later birth by 
reason of its subjectivity. 

Such an age as the heroic age of Greece, 



72 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

gifted with the race's mold of spirit, with 
the race's feeling for art in the power of 
words, and with a graceful, flexible speech 
approaching perfection in its form, a lan- 
guage of wonderful resource in shading its 
meaning, — an age like this, conscious of the 
gift of words yet centering on the doer of 
deeds, must delight in the narrative of events, 
sung in fluent and stately meter, clothed in all 
the color of life. Epic poetry is the product 
of this age; no other age has ever produced 
the genuine epic song. Broad, bright, mov- 
ing pictures finished to the last degree but 
not encumbered by inanimate detail — such 
are the rhapsodies of Homer. The shining 
of spears and waving of plumes fill the Iliad 
with life, and the keen, salt air of the sea 
blows through the romantic pages of the 
Odyssey. Nothing in nature was trivial or 
mean in the eyes of the old poet. Everything 
enjoys its ornamental epithet. 

And the days they broadly lived, those typ- 
ical men and women — their social and man- 
nerly human life, their piety, their natural 
dignity, their restraint, their courage and 
bravery, their warfare, their travel and their 
open politics, their dwellings, the magic tri- 



EPIC POETRY THE AGE'S PECULIAR ART 73 

pods hammered by a god's hands, their 
youth's delight in exquisite work of woven 
peplum and in precious material, their shin- 
ing, high-wrought armor — frankly stand be- 
fore us to-day and tell the measure of their 
adolescent joys. ' ' Ewig jung allein ist Phan- 
tasie." Their imagination seized beauty in 
tectonic crafts inherited from the old ^Egean 
days, and feasted as that of a child. 

The epos was the reality of the spirit of 
the time. In Homer's poems the Hellenic 
race was itself reflected and became conscious 
of its ideals. In Homer the Hellenes first 
came to know themselves. The poet took 
their early race conceptions, their beliefs and 
traditions, their modes of looking at life, and 
made them the fountain and stream of his 
song. He summarized the race's past — the 
Iliad is the tale of the battle of the Achseans 
fighting their way to adventurous wealth. 

But that which he created reacted power- 
fully upon the national mind. The human 
life the verses mirrored led the Hellenes to 
train their youth upon its conduct, upon its 
embodied keywords for life conduct. The 
Iliad's pan-Hellenism taught race-conscious- 
ness ; for instance, when Greeks advanced to 



74 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

battle "longing in their soul to support one 
another,' ' "so the clan shall succor clan, and 
tribe, tribe." It held a moral as well as a 
literary education. Through centuries com- 
ing later, and far into the imperial times of 
Eome, Homer's poems stood as a Bible — that 
is, the songs were to the Greeks as the Bible 
and its word of God-in-the-world have been to 
the modern Christian community. It compre- 
hended as well an encyclopaedia of science and 
arts and genealogy. Homer's Iliad denoted 
their race and fatherland in youngest man- 
hood. 

The blind poet, to repeat, invented no 
story. He took race sagas, time-honored 
tales of Troy, and lays embodying traditions 
of the old civilization, and wrought them into 
rhapsodies, casting them in perfect form and 
stamping them with the process of a great 
creative mind. He sang to such assemblies 
as filled the houses of chief, king and lord, to 
their wives, daughters and retainers. Per- 
haps also he sang to frequenters of popular 
festivals whither throngs had journeyed to 
honor some god of the race. And long after 
his day, at great festivals of Athens, relays 
of bards chanted the Iliad and Odyssey. 



EPIC POETRY THE AGE'S PECULIAR ART 75 

He sang of the eternal powers, of human 
deeds and men's and women's lives. His in- 
troduction of their earth's places, sea-coasts 
and currents, and land and sea winds, must 
needs fit themselves to fact and be true not 
only to the event he would narrate, but also 
to his hearers ' taste and life and knowledge. 
He sang to bring his listeners the delight of 
larger vision of men and of the world, and 
the delight also of a perfect art. He sang 
with the warmth and intensity of a mighty 
seer. To this day the ear of man has never 
become weary of listening to his silver tones. 
Nor has the mind of man lost amaze at his 
poetic fire and splendid diction. He was the 
first Hellene who, it has been said, voiced his 
race's courage and unconquerable will to pen- 
etrate life and set it forth as an intelligent 
order. He is, at least, the first of whom we, 
know. 

Joy is the keynote of Homer, joy in a bril- 
liant, beautiful world. His people, especially 
his men, idealized self-reliant beings, choose a 
brief and active life in the world to droning, 
unlaborious days in the quietude of home. 
Here on this earth is man's theater of action. 
After this the unseen world, Hades, and it 



76 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

were better, the wraith of Achilles declared 
from the midst of the shades, here on earth to 
serve some man of mean estate than to dwell 
with all who have gone down to death. 

Homer exalted nobles and kings and their 
business, war. The people, toilers and up- 
builders who supported the destroyers and 
idlers, could labor and listen and yield to the 
overlord's decision. But it is, in fairness, 
worth noting in the measure we have taken 
of these epic Hellenes, and of their innate 
humanity, that nowhere in the Iliad and 
Odyssey are such pictures of narrowness, 
hardness and inhumanity as are painted in 
the Hebrew epos of patriarchal life and the 
Law — and in times supposed to synchronize 
with the times the Greek poems portray. 

Mutations in those old centuries we can 
with no sureness visualize. Between the old 
civilization of Homer's song and the new 
about to be born was a shifting of races — 
of that at least we may be certain. Experi- 
ences must have been manifold and prolonged, 
the pain of the world-spirit caustic, to change 
the social consciousness of the Hellenes from 
the life portrayed by this earliest epic of 
theirs we know. 



ANOTHER EPIC SINGER 77 

After the close of the age of Homer's story, 
uniting that age with the age to come, another 
epic singer and an iEolian Greek, belong- 
ing perhaps to another prehistoric minstrel 
school, tuned his lyre to a wholly different 
key. He himself and his hearers, all with the 
staid, sad heart of earth-workers, had lost 
heroic enthusiasms. Some great impelling 
force, a force we find in the democracy of the 
coming age, was beginning to make its way 
and direct the thoughts of men. 

Hesiod told of the inherent dignity of labor 
— of planting, sowing, reaping, of winter 
storms and the bearing on corn-planting of 
the spring rainfall, of the cry of crane and 
sparrow, of the cutting of vines, of the leafing 
of trees, the threshing of corn, of the vintage, 
of thrift and diligence — an early Greek 
Thomas Tusser in his plain, shrewd, cautious, 
homely saws, not forgetting the crusty fling at 
women such natures commonly nurture, a 
"Poor Richard' - it has been said, a singer 
who learned by his own experience in a law- 
suit to declare how much more the half is 
than the whole, and how blessed a man might 
be upon a diet of mallows and leeks — ' ' That 
man is best who is most laborious"; who has 



78 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

judgment about the birds (their song, their 
coming and going habits explaining increase 
and decline of the seasons), and who shuns 
overstepping of the (moral) laws; "In front 
of virtue the gods set work and the sweat of 
the forehead.' ' Practice virtue, not neces- 
sarily for virtue itself but for the sake of the 
results of the practice. In this teaching the 
poet's evolution is similar to that of Leviticus 
and Deuteronomy, and rises at times to the 
standard of the Proverbs and the Wisdom of 
Solomon. 

Hesiod was a true child of his tribe which 
obtained the sovereignty of Boeotia after that 
subversion we call the Trojan war — a vigor- 
ous, hardy people whose minds rarely soared 
beyond the body's needs, a people, neverthe- 
less, who brought from northern Pieria to 
Mount Helicon the ancient worship of the 
Muses and centuries later produced Corinna 
and Pindar. Instead of Homer's abandon to 
the shining, shifting, broad epic world dis- 
solving and disappearing about him, Hesiod 
struggles with reality, with the set bounds of 
the small farmer in the iron age in which he 
lives, when wrong is rampant and the great 
devour bribes and give crooked judgment. 



ANOTHER EPIC SINGER 79 

The golden age and the gentle bronze age for 
mortals have passed. In Elysian Fields and 
Islands of the Blessed may be some relief for 
the ills of earth. 

Not a brilliant, imaginative, objective, but a 
subjective world, the thoughts of himself, this 
Boeotian shepherd chiefly sings. Nowhere is 
poetry his sole aim. Didactics, practical 
wisdom embedding proverbs of possibly ear- 
lier singers on every-day affairs of life, 
ethical precepts, and teachings about the gods 
are his work. The Olympians of Hesiod are 
further away from human habitations than 
in Homer 's song. ' ' No prophet among men, ■ ' 
he sang, " shall know the mind of aegis-bear- 
ing Zeus, ' ' son of Time. His Theogony tell- 
ing of the genesis of the world and the origin 
of the gods embodies passages of elevation 
and dignity. " First of all was Chaos: then 
came the broad-bosomed Earth, the stable 
resting place of all things ; and gloomy Tar- 
tarus in the depths of the Earth; and Eros, 
fairest of the immortals." 

The poems foreshadow ideas of the new, 
opening age, and it seems impossible that 
Hesiod was ignorant of the coming cult of 
Orphism. But in the Theogony he so sang 



80 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

the old legends of the gods that the poem 
came in later Greece to be esteemed a code 
of the race's early religious conceptions. It 
formed a dogma — but under Greek conditions 
was without the seclusion and exclusive in- 
terpretation of priests. 



BURGEONING DEMOCRACY; ITS 
PURITANISM; ITS ART 



In Greece the universality of human life and thought, 
of human civilization, let me say the true idea of man, 
first came into appearance; the full development of 
individualism, and with it the true freedom of man, 
in all the relations which we comprise under this 
word, morally, politically, intellectually, artistically, were 
created spontaneously at first in Greece and only in 
Greece. — EduArd Meyer, in The Development of Indi- 
viduality in Ancient History. 

(GREECE SPEAKS) 

Earth . . . 
I am she that made thee lovely with my beauty 

From north to south: 
Mine, the fairest lips, took first the fire of duty 

From thine own mouth. 
Mine, the fairest eyes, sought first thy laws, and knew 
them 
Truths undefiled; 
Mine, the fairest hands, took freedom first into them, 
A weanling child. 
— Swinburne, in The Litany of Nations. 

To the Ancients however the aim of the agonistic edu- 
cation was the welfare of the whole, of the civic society. 
Every Athenian for instance was to cultivate his Ego 
in contest, so far that it should be of the highest service 
to Athens. . . . The youth thought of the welfare of 
his native town when he vied with others in running, 
throwing or singing; it was her glory that he wanted to 
increase with his own. . . . Every Greek from childhood 
felt within himself the burning wish to be ... an in- 
strument for the welfare of his own town. — Friedrich 
Nietzsche, in Homer's Contest. 



BURGEONING DEMOCRACY; ITS 
PURITANISM; ITS ART 

PASSING OF THE MONARCHY: CONSTRUCTIVE 
INDIVIDUALISM 

The beautiful youth of Hellas, the Greek 
heroic age, faded in the gloom of an indefin- 
able period of which we know nothing, not 
even its durance — in immense political con- 
vulsions which accompanied the emergence 
upon the f orescene of the great Greek division 
that the Hellenes called Dorian. That other 
general division, the versatile, imaginative, 
fluid, seafaring Ionians — Javan of "the Isles 
afar off" says the Hebrew Isaiah writing 
about the beginning of this new age of Greece 
— that lively, impassioned, sunlit folk suscep- 
tible of most delicate impressions, isolated, 
disunited and broken with feuds, the ^Egean 
Ionians had their complementary character in 
Dorians so-called, perhaps the most persist- 
ently warlike of all the hardy northern in- 
comers, who, in the darkness of the indefin- 

83 



84 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

able centuries, sallied from their highlands 
and made themselves masters — masters who 
reverenced a severe spirit, who had the strik- 
ing constancy of character and solemnity of 
thought of country dwellers, who scorned the 
effeminacies of art and the democratization of 
trade, who subjected all that came within their 
reach to their notions of right and of civil 
government, who knew but two passions — war 
and a religion identified with pride of and 
loyalty to race. 

The Dorians roused in Greece a spirit far 
more rugged, less extended but far deeper 
than that which mirrored Homer 's picture- 
loving song. With them a re-formation of 
spiritual poise established itself. Greek Pur- 
itans were invigorating the national spirit. 
The age of the emancipation of the individual 
is now coming on. Much of the old mediation 
of the king, that primitive consciousness that 
found group-feeling and group-thinking nec- 
essary, is now passing away. Each man 
would enter into direct relations with the 
world. The lord of men, the old royalty, is 
in some cities overthrown. Even the very 
limited power of the king came to seem to 
the people, now fully Hellenic, an immoral 



CONSTRUCTIVE INDIVIDUALISM OF CITIES 85 

form of government inasmuch as it failed in 
moderation, self -limitation, forced itself upon 
separate, individual beings, opened the way 
for visitation of retribution — from power and 
wealth spring satiety, from satiety foolish-* 
ness, offense, crime. 

The politics of the time undergo a striking 
evolution, varying in form and even in method 
of development. Cities are springing for- 
ward and their growth marks the individu- 
ality of men. It is worth noting here that 
in the little land of Palestine during the 
eighth and seventh centuries before Christ, as 
Amos and Hosea and Isaiah make clear, a 
struggle went on for the recognition of the 
conscience of a single individual. 

In many Greek city-states, as time passes 
oligarchs establish themselves. They super- 
sede the king and absorb his function of ad- 
ministration to themselves. They are chiefs 
who served as councilors to the dispossessed 
king, or nobles claiming descent from the 
mighty men of old, the interpretation of the 
law and the exercise of some religious rite. 
They embody the first political expression of 
the new order in its change from the old. 
The people are free, but still without active 



86 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

political rights. Their evolving conscious- 
ness of separateness or individualism the 
aristocracies doubtless appeased by occasion- 
ally calling together their general assembly. 
But the assumption of the oligarchs bore 
home to farmer and artisan, and to the new 
order created by development of commerce, 
the lesson that the functions of administering 
government were not sole prerogatives of a 
heaven-descended king, but rather a power 
that could be granted by law and directed to 
certain ends. 

The state had become a more complicated 
thing than in Homeric song. Sense of apart- 
ness, rudimentary individualism, growing ca- 
pacity for self-control or law-abidingness, was 
able to reason that if nobles could supersede 
the king of the heroic age, should not also the 
assembly of citizens in which rested the ulti- 
mate source of authority of the state? Here 
was not only the democratic idea in strong 
force, but feeling of membership of the state, 
fellowship in a common government and 
the duties it involves — the state is a rational 
order which men must have for a tolerable 
and complete life. 

Constructive, progressive, promotive, gifted 



CONSTRUCTIVE INDIVIDUALISM OF CITIES 87 

with imagination and reason, the mind and 
will of the Hellene worked out in some snch 
development its consciousness of political 
right. In its process the struggle between 
nobles, rich in inherited prerogatives and 
material belongings, and the emerging peo- 
ples was fairly before the world. 

During this progress, however, there in- 
tervened the setting up and brilliant rule 
of those liberals known as tyrants or des- 
pots — men who posed as defenders of simpler 
men against the rapacity of the oligarchs. 
There was now in the growing towns a sturdy 
commons, and, in the country, farmers of 
free mind who had faith in inborn rights. 
In various ways, by force of seizing the 
city's acropolis through hired troops, by wile 
of proclaiming himself champion of the people 
in injustices they had suffered at the hands 
of exploiters, the new overlord, oftenest from 
the oligarchs whom he endeavored to dis- 
possess, held his absolute power and asserted 
the civic unity of the elements of the state. 
He tranquillized factional feelings by meet- 
ing their divisions. Commonly his govern- 
ment was an excess of paternalism; his court 
a center of all his time's splendor in art and 



88 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

literature; his benefactions and public gifts 
most lavish and magnificent. The Peisistra- 
tidse, for example, tyrants in Athens even 
after Solon's time, set up the flowing recital, 
by minstrel at the pan-Athenaic festival, of 
the Iliad and Odyssey in their completeness. 
In architecture they began to the honor of 
Zeus Olympius a temple whose fragments, 
though belonging to a much later century, 
beautify Athens to-day. 

Only extreme conditions of the old feudal- 
ism during under ideas evolved by new orders 
coming to the fore, by fresh blood and a new 
point of view of lif e spreading through Greek 
lands, permitted the tyrants' hold during the 
generations they continued. Mouthing inter- 
est in the people, yet seeking to gain the 
strength of the executive power which the 
oligarchs by their robberies had weakened, 
the tyrants eased civil strife, kept Greek 
social foundations from severest shock and 
bridged the break between the old ideas and 
oncoming democracy. Now as at all times 
the people formed history — the body of the 
people ever ready for self-sacrifice, to give 
life and property to their country. A few 
with the instinct, or avarice, or corruption, 



CONSTRUCTIVE INDIVIDUALISM OF CITIES 89 

of leaders suggested and endeavored to guide. 
At times the Greek despot proved what his 
name signified in centuries then to come. 

' 'All Hellas in early times," says Thucyd- 
ides, "was in a state of migration.' 9 The 
Ionians were especially mobile; inroads of 
peoples from the north may have kept them 
unstable. In the great human flux of these 
centuries many Ionic Greeks settled the coast 
of Asia Minor and developed rich cities which 
later focused civilizations far surpassing in 
luxury the motherland's. They also evolved 
a great citizen class which enjoyed unheard- 
of felicity; "The middle classes are best off 
in many ways," said Phocylides, a gnomie 
poet of Miletus. 

Hellas was not in exactness a geographical 
expanse. It bespoke spiritual possessions. 
It had meant in religious worship certain 
traditions and rites projected by race con- 
sciousness, in art an excellence, in character 
a moderation and independence. It was com- 
ing to mean in political life a constitution. 

In these centuries of political inorganity 
discontent ruled everywhere. Old homes be- 
came narrow. As the leaves of the forest, 
so are the generations of men, sings Homer; 



90 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

leaves that be, the winds scatter upon the 
ground, but blooming woods, when spring- 
time comes, put forth other anew. Greek 
peoples had waxed. Legends of fair, favored 
lands beyond the seas tickled willing ears and 
ardent imaginations. Those more curious in- 
tellectually, and more adventurous and phys- 
ically energetic, stirred for broader spaces. 
Greece swarmed with colonies that carried 
her children and her burgeoning heritage 
over the Mediterranean, dotting the shores 
of the Euxine, to the neighborhood of that 
now called Crimea, and the Propontis as well 
as ^Egean, with settlements. They fared 
along the sea's water ways founding Cumse, 
Tarentum, Sybaris and Croton, Cyrene, Mar- 
seilles, and entered upon the luxuriant fertil- 
ity of Sicily, then as now a home of nature's 
lethal forces which sometimes wake and turn 
and shudder — forces which the immigrants 
to Gela and Syracuse and other Hellenic 
towns, with penetrating imagination person- 
ified as a discomfited giant, " cliffs press 
down his hairy breast and a pillar of heaven 
holds him fast, even hoary -ZEtna, nurse of 
sharp snows through all the year." Wher- 
ever they settled they bore in, in sign of 



CONSTRUCTIVE INDIVIDUALISM OF CITIES 91 

spiritual unity, sacred fire from the hearth 
of their mother city, and the worship of 
Apollo, keeper of the civic life of their old 
home and kindler of illuminating thought in 
the darkness of neighboring barbarians. 

The colonists' life of essaying the mighty 
task of home and settlement building gave 
those Greeks of ancient days, as it has in these 
late centuries of ours given modern colonists, 
a buoyancy, an openness and receptivity of 
mind, a susceptibility to the influence of new 
ideas, and a readiness for opportunity and 
zeal in experimentation, which led the people 
often to outstrip those they had left behind. 
The first elegiac and lyric poets of whom we 
know were in the eastern settlements. Phi- 
losophy found an early home at Miletus and 
among the Hellenes of Italy and Sicily. The 
first excellent dramatists were western Sicil- 
ians. 

Between these daughter colonies and their 
mother cities Hellenes journeyed continually, 
thus adding to the keen wit of their nativity 
the eye-opener of travel. Because of a com- 
mon alliance of blood, or for civic needs, they 
visited the oracle of Apollo at Delphi or other 
religious uses, they fared to the national 



92 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

games, their festivals in poetry, music and 
disciplined skill of body. Their travel by 
water way meant the need of larger and more 
seaworthy boats. Thus colonization stimu- 
lated mechanics of boat-building. And with 
navigation must go better knowledge of as- 
tronomy and mathematics. Allied arts and 
crafts advanced. Stamped coins as stand- 
ards of value came to displace old estimates, 
such as the Homeric measure by armor. 

Through this progress of commerce de- 
mocracy gained much. Language also, that 
marvelous speech of theirs, was developing 
its fitness for public discussion of interests 
of state. Speakers felt the need of argument, 
and in effort to explain and persuade, power 
of expression was growing among the people. 
The ethical and philosophic thinker, the gno- 
mic speaker, at this time also increased the 
language by whittling out those life-conduct 
maxims with which the Hellene was so splen- 
didly equipped. 

But on nearly every side, in the west in 
Sicily, as in Agrigentum, in cities of the Asia 
Minor coast, in Miletus, among the Ionian 
islands, as Samos, was the despot, the benevo- 
lent organizer, the force all social elements 



CONSTRUCTIVE INDIVIDUALISM OF CITIES 93 

recognized or submitted to in gaining a new 
recasting, in bringing social order to inde- 
pendence. Not in Sparta, however, the com- 
pletest political embodiment of the Dorian 
character. In the compact aristocracy of that 
city-camp, the accredited founder of which 
was the legislator Lycurgus, two kings 
reigned together in not distinctly lined func- 
tions. There the government was an oli- 
garchy in which the power of the ephors was 
little modified by the council of elders and the 
agora of citizens. All free men were sol- 
diers. Spartan law forbade the Spartan 
proper learning a mechanical trade or ar- 
tistry. The productive class and the crafts- 
men, those laboring and supplying necessi- 
ties, a race of serfs, had no political rights. 

In the Athens of these days the king dis- 
appeared by the shearing of the priest part 
of his office of basileus, and naming him 
archon for life. To name him chief archon 
for ten years and then divide his power 
among nine archons appointed each year 
marked other steps in evolution. The legis- 
lation of the serene and humane spirit of 
Solon (594-3 B. C.) went still further. In its 
relief, for instance, to small farmers liable, 



94 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

in the economic distress of the time, to en- 
slavement for the debt of mortgages, and in 
endeavor to set order between established 
classes, "I gave," he said, "as mnch strength 
as is enough, without taking away from their 
honor, or adding to it. To those who had 
power and the splendor of riches I gave 
counsel that they should not uphold violence. 
I stood with my strong shield spread over 
both and suffered neither to prevail by 
wrong." But Solon, governor of Athens, 
found his generous ardor incommunicable. 

We know already that to the Greeks cast- 
ing away the old and endeavoring to evolve 
a new sense of the state, two principles of 
government, a loose and close-knit, were at 
hand. Among the fluent peoples to the north 
they saw a tribal life where conflict was per- 
ennial and power lay with one man only so 
long as he had force to hold the headship. 
To the east there lay the sluggish, military 
levia*than whose head was a weak, lust- 
ful czar, whose body, millions of subjects, 
heterogeneous, possessed of no spirit of in- 
dividuality nor of organization, still in the 
bounds of the primitive group, cohering 
through fear and slavish acquiescence. In, 



CONSTRUCTIVE INDIVIDUALISM OF CITIES 95 

neither political form could the Hellenes see 
the service of freedom for which they were 
outreaching, and reason they sought as a foot- 
hold. Neither offered to their aspiring polit- 
ical genius a union of independent wills for 
which the law they were learning to make, 
and agree to, was master. Knowledge of 
oriental absolutism, and tribal anarchy, 
strengthened their love of a free state and 
quickened their race consciousness. 

Hatred of the Greeks at these times for 
kings and the difficult rule of the oligarchs, 
was doubtless often founded upon reflection 
induced by economic distresses, and the de- 
generation of the aristocrat to a plutocrat. 
Their states were small and the people came 
into close contact with their princelings. 
Upon their early notion of just balance, of 
equity, and their growing sense of ordered 
justice, a prevalence of law, a political prin- 
ciple doubtless strengthened by Dorian in- 
fluences — that every individual of the state, 
without any exception whatever, should bring 
his individual desires and passions within 
the control and regulation of the rule agreed 
to in the state — they founded their common- 
wealths. Most of all should those do this in 



96 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

whom power was vested. ' ' A well-constituted 
state is made,'' said Solon, "when the people 
obey the rulers, and the rulers obey the 
laws," "when good laws and good govern- 
ment set the state in order, subdue insolence, 
chain the hands of evil doers, set straight the 
crooked ways of perverted law," even when 
"citizens seek to overthrow the state by love 
of money and by running after self-seeking 
demagogues." The shifty uncertainty and 
restlessness of his times deeply impressed 
Solon and may have led to his panegyric ex- 
pression for stability. 

In law men set a rule, they endeavor to 
conserve the eternal, the unchangeable, what 
they deem best. Law is "reason without 
passion. ' ' Law, ' ' born in heaven, ' > should be 
the expression of the judgment of the people. 
' ' The people ought to fight in defence of the 
law as they do of their city walls," said Her- 
aclitus. "Lawless disregard of the rights of 
others, they should be more careful to quench 
than a conflagration." "Law is to them ar- 
bitrary master," said Demaratus of his fel- 
low Spartans. And the old-time law of sacri- 
fice begetting love worked here. For that to 
which they had given their energy awoke in 



CONSTRUCTIVE INDIVIDUALISM OF CITIES 97 

the Greeks a new devotion. Loyalty to their 
city became and remained a passion. Their 
state was their larger, nobler, enduring, self- 
less selves. Duties to the state were to these 
Greeks paramount to all else. 

Thus the Greek cities, in their upbuilding 
and through generations of turbulence, 
learned to apply reason to politics. Many 
cities in various ways essayed forms of their 
idea of liberty — a state balanced, in harmony 
with the people it governed, the work of their 
spirit, embodying their character and indi- 
viduality. The end of the state was to them, 
as Aristotle said in a later time, "a good 
life, ' ' the life that brings out the best in the 
individual, that guides and teaches the spirit 
of man, a city whose form and government 
connects itself with the best works. So the 
city-state becomes the individual's end; in 
that he realizes himself. The Hellene be- 
lieved himself to have gained independence 
when he gained the independence of his state. 

The Hellene's city-state aimed at an ideal 
society. It connoted a perfect organization, 
all its parts intertwined and uniting in en- 
deavor to form a flawless whole. Side by 
side with this age 's individualism, as in other 



98 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

epochs marked by healthy individualistic 
spirit, went the ideal of devotion that prompts 
the individual to bring his own peculiar gifts 
to the welfare of the whole and to suffer a 
snuffing out of the individual factor — that is, 
the individualism developing among the 
Greeks of this day must combine with others 
similar to its own in order to gain its end. 
The best individual was the best citizen. 



ORPHISM: ELEUSINIAN MYSTERIES: RECRUDES- 
CENCE OF SUPERSTITION 

But the greatest mark of this second dis- 
tinctive phase of the Greek spirit is not its 
nascent democracy — except as its nascent 
democracy is a result of the reflection with 
which the Hellenes with their ever-present 
religious consciousness, begin to consider life 
and the world and their problems. 1 The hu- 
man spirit turns from scenes shining with 
gods and heroes to consider itself. In this 
action it unites with its attitude in the social 
crisis and is part of the whole movement of 

1 "The first of human concerns is religion" — a sentence 
which the English Lord Acton wrote — voices the feeling 
of the Hellenes. 



DIONYSUS: ORPHISM 99 

the era. A free state is parent of a free de- 
velopment of the religious consciousness of 
man. The rise of cities broke up the old di- 
visions of tribes and created others anew, re- 
cast new loyalties. The old gods no longer 
satisfy, nor the old maxims and ideals of man- 
hood. Life must have a more profound, more 
self-satisfying aim. 

Onward from the eighth century before 
Christ, we have seen, men's thoughts moved 
from the heroic glory that colored the age 
f oredone to will, thought, feeling that the hu- 
man being was of consideration. In the 
struggle at hand the individual was now the 
factor of weight. In politics he was forc- 
ing new forms. He sought explanation for 
his awakened longings. Time was ripe for 
a new religion. With exacting democracy, a 
practical sense of democracy's value in af- 
fairs of life, has always gone a distinguished 
other-worldliness, a puritanism — the intense 
practicality of democracy, its emphatic appeal 
to the individual thought and emotion, seems 
to be at one with the individualism of puri- 
tanism and its all-controlling homesickness 
for heaven. 

The north from time immemorial has been 



100 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

the home of spiritual impulses. ^Egean 
peoples of the pre-Greek age had been "earth- 
born,' ' and their Mother Earth, Earth the 
Life-giver, (pual^ooQ ala, barely spiritualized. 
The first Greek, he of the heroic centuries, had 
laid stress upon the importance, the dominion, 
the divinity of the body. To him the soul was 
a vapor akin to a strengthless underworld, a 
pitiful phantasm. In the age now beginning 
a new religion, Orphism, emphasized the very 
antithesis of this — that the soul must be of 
celestial essence, and the body no more than 
a dungeon in which the heavenly being was 
chained. Northern folk shut off from the al- 
luring joy in nature's face of the south, and 
in their colder, more somber climate, devel- 
oped introspection. 

Worship of Dionysus came directly from 
Thracians, perhaps indirectly from cognate 
peoples in Phrygia. It may have been a re- 
surgence of old, pre-Greek religious faiths. 
Doubtless it was allied to seasonal and fer- 
tility rites of the religion of the iEgeans. 
Among certain communities of Hellas the god, 
with his band of attendant satyrs and women 
devotees, invaded the hold of the definite 
divinities of Homer's song — divinities them- 



DIONYSUS: ORPHISM 101 

selves 1 we have seen often originating in and 
evolved ont of physical elements and physical 
impulses of the world. That also was Diony- 
sus, the mighty spirit-workman of the sap and 
of the warming soil, a son of Earth Mother, 
of the Mother of Corn, in his northern home 
the grantor of fertility, the god who quick- 
ened vegetation of tree and thicket. Also 
god, perhaps, of a cereal intoxicant ; at last at 
home and in Greece becoming the god of 
grapes and wine. 

To the religious, humanizing mind of the 
Hellene, who felt with primal vividness the 
charm of the mysterious workings of nature 
and revered the products of that magic, all 
grain and nourishing fruits were possessed of 
a god. The feeling is still in our hearts when 
we stand in amaze before the demiurgic force 
of spring; when we watch the growths of a 
corn field, turn from picking a wind-flower, or 
mourn in the fall of an elm the passing of a 
fellow. 

The spirit of fertility, Dionysus, is spoken 
of in Homer. But the poet treats him mea- 
gerly, possibly because the god had lately 
made his way and then held no recognition as 
a master. Whether his cult was borne to the 



102 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

Greeks by Thracian or Hellene convert and 
standard-bearer, or whether some human 
wave leaping southward carried the god's ti- 
dings, is lost in the long silence between first 
Greek records and that far-away day. With 
Dionysus went also Eros, Love, the world- 
building, primal life, 2 the Ancient One who 
set the stars a-dancing. Eros gave the mys- 
tic teachings. Both were gods of the fertili- 

,2 In Love's name, wrote the Greek Sophocles, are hid- 
den many names, force, desire, energy, and tranquillity. 

No modern has better expressed the Greek conception 
of Eros in his influence upon human kind than Cole- 
ridge in this verse: 

"All thoughts, all passions, all delights, 
Whatever stirs this mortal frame, 
All are but ministers of Love, 
And feed his sacred flame." 

Robert Bridges, poet laureate of England, has put an 
essentially Hellenic thought in the first five of the fol- 
lowing lines : 

"Love, from whom the world begun 
Hath the secret of the sun. 

Love can tell, and love alone, 
Whence the million stars were strewn, 
Why each atom knows its own, 
How, in spite of woe and death, 
Gay is life and sweet is breath." 



DIONYSUS: ORPHISM 103 

zation of the earth and of life. In this way, 
again, the Hellenes' consciousness of an all- 
controlling spirit, and their instinct for seek- 
ing its visibility, manifested itself. 

Amid its northlands faith in soul-wander- 
ings was clearly united with the Dionysus re- 
ligion. That in man a god lived who would 
be free when he could break the chains of the 
body, was deeply grounded in the Dionysus 
cult and its purificatory ecstasies and rituals. 
In the amplitude of the night— and in the 
night perhaps because Dionysus was of the 
earth, a chthonian god, and dwelt in the dark, 
or again perhaps because of the faith, com- 
mon even among later Greeks, of a secret and 
mysterious fullness of life amid the powers of 
the earth at night — in the amplitude of the 
night, clad in skins, decked with the wanton 
ivy and that other vine, the grape, mother of 
strange power, their hair bound with some 
fertility charm or emblem, a lissome snake or 
a plant, waving torches to purge the air of 
evil, in unconstrained nearness to nature, joy- 
ing in union with the universal life, the ritual- 
ists of the religion carried on their mysteries 
and reveled through wildwood, vale of thicket 
and over mountain, far from restraint of the 



104 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

abode of men. Their great nature god had 
put an unaccountable magic in the vine and 
its clusters, some holy animate thing. Di- 
onysus, the way of life, was through this 
magic in wine. Wine itself was divine. 
The very god vitalized the fermented drink, 
and he most fully seized those who drank 
deepest. Also in the kid of their sacrifice the 
devotees partook of communion. Crying 
"Evoe!" they ate the flesh raw for the sake 
of vital power; to absorb the sacred blood 
while it was warm was to absorb life. 

Flutes shrilled and increased their emotion. 
In the dance sacred to the root-being, world- 
builder, Eros, their Bacchic ecstasy was com- 
pleted. The god incarnated the emotion of 
the dance, the personification. Their frenzy 
was believed to evoke the fructifying powers 
of the earth, and, in the hushed exhaustion 
that follows over-exaltation, the spirit to have 
its profoundest communion with and absorp- 
tion in the infinite. The goal of the rite was 
the god's dwelling within the devout and for 
the time granting his character and power. 

The communion may have been a survival of 
early totemic rites in which devotees sought 
to gain the life-force of a slain beast by 



DIONYSUS: ORPHISM 105 

assimilating his flesh and by getting inside 
the skin of the sacrifice. In their eating of 
his flesh they felt that they fortified and sanc- 
tified themselves — through assimilation of the 
divine substance. In those days rituals of 
human sacrifice were reported in Thrace — 
and also among contemporary Hebrews and 
other tribes. 

This new cult, it has been noted, made one 
appeal to the Greeks which in all centuries 
beckons every child of the human race — the 
call to ecstatic submergence in the pulsing 
wild of the world, a return to primitive ideas 
and simple ancestral ways of many thousands 
of years before, a hurling aside of conventions 
stultifying or nullifying the true being. If 
they had this conception in their rites, the 
Hellenes would, in short, return for the time 
to stimulating kinship with the fawn and fox 
and other beasts whose skins they wore when 
they worshiped. In the centuries this re- 
ligion took on the strong anthropomorphism 
of the Greek spirit, the Hellenes were develop- 
ing their town life. 

The enthusiasm of Dionysus may have been 
a phase of that spiritual experience called, in 
the phrase of certain psychologists, "autom- 



106 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

atism," or "uprushing of the subliminal 
consciousness' ' of each individual spirit — 
that is, it may have been psychically akin to 
the supernormal mood called " conversion. ' ' 
The cult emphasized the precept that only 
through a soul's experience of spiritual 
ecstasy, an inner catastrophe, a second birth, 
could the human pass to the divine, and it 
used hypnotizing methods for bringing on the 
trance. 

In the old Greek cult faith in the enthusiasm 
was widespread. It seized upon the energies 
of its converts, and as a whole exalted them> 
even if the common sanity and every-day 
measure of the moral code stood aside for the 
time and the excesses of the enthusiasm were 
subject to interpretation by symbol alone. 

Freeing the god by breaking the chains of 
the body identified the early night feasts of 
the north, and even, especially at first, in 
some parts of Greece. But when Orphic mys- 
tics took over and adapted the faith to the 
life of towns struggling with the evolving and 
practical democracy of Hellas, nocturnal 
wanderings and excesses of devotees could be 
followed only in symbolic copy. The Diony- 
sus worship was in Hellas subject to the Hel- 



DIONYSUS: ORPHISM 107 

lene's rationalizing and stood for the most 
part for consistent and energetic morality. 
Still, while sobered by the Greek spirit a 
fervor, an inebriety of mind, persisted in 
hymns and other celebrations of the god, and 
differentiated his ritual from that of the older 
gods. Not only in their choral dithyramb, 
or spring song and the imitative dance, but 
even later in their sculpture and painting the 
Greeks showed this enthusiasm. 

The antipathy of an ancient, racial, ordered 
sobriety, we say, met the whirling reel of the 
Dionysus worship. For generations the 
Greeks' instinct had maintained a deep- 
grounded aversion to extravagant mental agi- 
tation, to losing oneself in the boundlessness 
of feeling. Their love of temperance forbade 
it and the reaction that must follow. The 
Greeks were masters of themselves. Excess 
among them was rare. Always with them 
was the sense of proportion. But profound 
disturbances of home and state in the midst 
of the ideas of a brilliant age now inutile, 
moribund, foredone, may have heart-sickened 
a finely balanced people, at a loss in the ob- 
jective world and conscious of its empty an- 
swer to their new inner questions. 



108 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

If this were true, resurgence of an ances- 
tral faith may have come easily. Could the 
wants of those old Hellenes, miseries induced 
by continued disaster, by lust for power of 
old aristocracies, by avarice of the new des- 
pots, have opened their souls to desire for a 
life antipathetic to the immediate past and its 
faiths f — to the reception of gods of the great 
magic Life of the earth, the embodiment not 
only of the mysteries from wine but from 
mental self -intoxication and immoderate 
night-revels, the spirit of enthusiasm that uni- 
fies the solitary with the general and through 
the mystery of emotion envisages to the sub- 
ject the living, pulsing whole and promise of 
ever-lasting possession? In any era of his- 
tory the emergence of a previously restricted 
and uneducated multitude to civic freedom 
means a refreshing and rehabilitation of re- 
ligious enthusiasm. 

A religion is the product of a single people 
and their needs. From its very inception it 
moves cautiously towards universalizing it- 
self. It adapts itself and modifies foreign or 
distasteful elements to suit its surroundings. 
It takes here rites and there rituals and faiths 
from those it meets and would draw within its 



DIONYSUS: ORPHISM 109 

final crystallization. The character of a cnlt 
and of a divinity depend really upon the char- 
acter of the sectarian; according to a mem- 
ber's environment and innerself he pictures 
his divinity, conceives him with grossness or 
with spirituality in the wise of his own sur- 
roundings and his own nature. 

Worship of Dionysus was, we have seen, a 
religion antagonistic to many old conceptions 
and traditions. Until some apostle with 
racial feeling for the Hellenes ' needs should 
recast and stamp the enthusiastic fervor and 
self-abandonment with their race's instinct 
and thought, and their race's piety, the cult 
could bear no general meaning to Greek life. 

The religion, we said, became Greek under 
the name of Orphism. Possibly the shadowy 
Orpheus, whose legend as a magical singer 
has penetrated all centuries and inspired song 
(even to our Shakespeare when he did sing), 
and whose fame as a prophet interpreted the 
imported rougher rites of Dionysus, taught 
that the enthusiasm, the Bacchic ecstasy, was 
a spiritual joy found in a pure and ascetic 
life. 

At the time Orphism was beginning to de- 
velop, intercourse between Egypt and Greece 



110 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

was again growing. An Egyptian puritan 
code preached ethical ideals similar to the 
Orphic. This puritanism and the old Thra- 
cian cult bringing Dionysus and mighty 
Eros, lords of life and death, before all other 
gods, Orpheus possibly united — united so that 
to separate the one from the other became im- 
possible. 

Orphism was an ancient system of mystic 
puritanism, and to say puritanism is to say in- 
dividualism, whose strength lay in an ascetic 
ordering of life, a denial of the body. It had 
a view of our later mediaeval times — that life 
was a mere probation. The religion's con- 
trolling idea was a freeing from earthly, tran- 
sitory things. The human who adopted it 
was no longer at one with, he was hostile to, 
nature. Orphism was also a half-philo- 
sophical speculation, a mysticism. Poetical 
imagery, as in most religions, played a con- 
siderable part. The worshiper through en- 
thusiasm strove to remove isolation, apart- 
ness, cleavage, and to complete identification 
with God. Such ideas, we said, were the 
first principles of the religion of Dionysus. 
Possession by the god meant becoming the 
god. The alien now was comrade and the 



DIONYSUS: ORPHISM 111 

soul united with the absolute. A visualizing 
of the object of worship, epiphany, happened. 
The entering of a god or spirit into the hu- 
man body was a not uncommon idea among 
the Greeks. State religion recognized it in 
the oracular possession of the Pythian priest- 
ess, who was clearly affected by the Diony- 
siac ecstasy. 

The gods were no more gods of the old 
Greek type, clear as the air, sensuous, simple, 
embodying the old group feeling and patri- 
archal. Newly created by Orphic fancies 
they held inseparable from their godhead a 
symbolic meaning, and also an ethical. They 
became shifting, mystical. The Orphic Zeus 
at times dwarfed all other gods — whom he in- 
cluded; — "Zeus is the beginning; Zeus is the 
middle; in Zeus is all complete.' ' While ad- 
mitting the multiplicity of higher powers, 
Orphism laid stress upon the solidarity of the 
universe, the identity of the individual soul 
with the universal soul. With the individual 
religion was at present concerned. But the 
dualism which divided soul and body would 
naturally evolve to a real dualism between the 
world and deity. 

Man must free himself from evil and re- 



112 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

turn to God of whom he — the immortal soul — ■ 
is a living part. Psyche, the soul, of heavenly 
birth and substance, through sin and to do 
penance for sin, became incarnate. She can 
not loose her bonds. Natural death grants 
her liberty — but for flitting to a purgatory be- 
low where, the soul's " education and nutri- 
ment," every good act in life, gains her re- 
ward. There she rests for a space and then 
returns to the upper air. She must be em- 
bodied anew. As the mote floats in the sun- 
beam so she floats, one of swarming soul-cells, 
and enters the human body, perhaps when 
breathing begins. She is matter, but matter 
so delicate as to be quite invisible, to be just 
on or beyond the border-line of visibility. 

The soul wanders the wide circle of neces- 
sity, changing habitations, entering bodies of 
man and beast. The way is long to her lib- 
erty. In new embodyings, to accomplish her 
circle of births, she comes to light again and 
again through a long series of palingeneses — 
perhaps for ten thousand years. One single 
earthly existence does not suffice to cleanse 
her from original sin. She fares upon a 
weary pilgrimage. Thus runs the wheel of 
births. 



DIONYSUS: ORPHISM 113 

By choice of good in life the circle may be 
shortened. Pindar sings that those who 
thrice on either side of death (on earth, or in 
the intervening period in the other world) 
have withheld their souls from wickedness, go 
where winds of ocean blow round the Islands 
of the Blessed. The soul's deeds in the one 
life will avail her allotment in the next. 
What a man did to others he must exactly 
suffer himself, his soul is degraded by its 
guilt to penitential punishment, to atonement. 
Thus he pays full penance for his sins. 
Orphism emphasized the ethical conscious- 
ness. Upon the ground of her purity the soul 
based her claims to everlasting bliss. In 
Orphism consideration of sin is subjective. 
In the Homeric centuries it had been object- 
ive. 

Still, escape from her imprisonment is open 
to the soul, the psyche, of man. She may be- 
come free from another birth and separate 
herself from becoming and decay. She may 
buoy herself by the hope of leaving the wheel 
of necessity and misery. There is a freeing 
from the clay in which the soul lies coffined, a 
prisoner in a prison, a shellfish in its shell. 
Blind men can not help themselves even if the 



114 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

healing is at hand. Orpheus brings hale. 
Demiurgic Eros, and Dionysus and his 
Bacchic train, will free. By the grace of the 
freeing gods a man shall be free, not by his 
own strength but by the enthusiasm of the 
god. 

The soul may become pure, free from all 
spot by Orphic consecration and Orphic life. 
1 ' Purity ' ' was the ringing cry of Orphism. 
Even the postulant, the initiate, robed in a 
linen tunic, symbolic white, must purify him- 
self by baths, by forbearance from certain 
foods, by charms against malevolent spirits 
and by that humility of spirit that finds exer- 
cise in self-examination. Such purification 
was necessary for deliverance. Purity of life 
was a condition of membership. When pure 
the soul is free and will no more suffer in- 
carnation. She will live in the sempiternal 
joys of paradise, she who sprang from God 
and is godlike. 

In the blissful life of the blessed, the soul, 
in conscious union with God, dwells in a land 
where is no freezing cold nor heat but gentle 
airs, where bounteous seasons bring in every 
fruit, and fountains water flower-starred 
meadows. "Upon the righteous,' ' sang the 



DIONYSUS: ORPHISM 115 

Orphic Pindar, "the glorious sun shineth, 
while here below it is night, and in meadows 
red with roses round their city gates and hazy 
with frankincense and laden with golden 
fruits. . . . and among them fair-flowered 
happiness blooms, and over that lovely land 
move sweet scents and mingle with the far- 
shining fire on the altar of the gods. ' ' In un- 
mixed delight the soul gladdens in services to 
the gods and in pursuit of wisdom, in the 
music of choruses, the drama of the poets and 
in banquets, according to the dialogue 
"Axiochus," at one time ascribed to Plato. 
Through the "Ph^do" we see the eye of 
Socrates in his last moments dwelling on a 
like paradise. These traditional hopes, famil- 
iar to us in their material, were sung to and 
by Orphic Hellenes, and were the natural and 
spontaneous beliefs of their faith acting upon 
an imaginative people. 3 

3 Many retellings of this old Orphic inspiration are 
still current and in many tongues. Essentially poetic, 
its subject caught the inediseval fancy when "a good 
dose of materialism" kept the people's health. An 
Italian bishop, Damiani, and a monk of Brittany, Ber- 
nard of Clugny, for instance, embodied it in the noble 
Latin hymns, "De Gloria et Gaudiis Paradisi," "Laus 
Patriae Cselestis." One greater, Dante, treated it with 



116 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

Faith in the immortal life-strength of the 
sonl is the keynote of the Orphic religion. 
The soul's union with the body and its exer- 
cises are a punishment of which she is ever 
striving to be free. "I am a child of earth 
and starry heaven ;" "Out of the pure I 
came;" "I have flown out of the sorrowful 
weary circle ; " " I have paid the penalty for 
deeds of iniquity,'' sing various gold tablets 
found in ancient tombs and undeniably voic- 
ing the Orphic cult even of this earlier period. 

Transmigration of souls, in its simplest ex- 
pression, has been a belief common to many 
peoples. It is a carrying to extreme logic the 
faith of submergence of the individual in 
tribal life, the progression of the group emo- 
tion to its furthest limit. The moral factor 
of palingenesis, that of purifying heart and 
ennobling soul and all desires and instincts, 

imaginative and speculative enthusiasm. English poets 
of inspiration have voiced it, for instance the sixteenth 
century author of the beautiful "Oh, Mother dear, Jeru- 
salem," and the nineteenth century Keats in his sensu- 
ous ode, "Bards of Passion and of Mirth." In German 
we have it in such poems as Riickert's 

"Das Paradies muss schoner sein 
Als jeder Ort auf Erden." 



DIONYSUS: ORPHISM 117 

rising on dead selves to higher things, strug- 
gles in the long evolution of the doctrine of 
metempsychosis. 

Thus the Dionysus cult those evolving 
Greeks took and hellenized — and to hellenize 
was to humanize. In Boeotia and Argolis, and 
at Delphi, traditions of the north prevailed, 
and at Thebes 4 women kept to Dionysus a 
three-yearly festival, the ecstatic ritual and 
orgiastic tumult held at night on Mount Ci- 
thaeron. But of the old Thracian enthusiasm 
the feast at Athens came hardly to show a 
vestige — although enthusiasm, the expression 
of a loftier and more gifted spirit than a 
human's own common mood, possession by a 
higher power apparent through words or 
actions, was attributed to the inspiration of a 
god by later Athenians and especially in the 
writings of Plato. 

Originally worshipers of Dionysus held 
him, with Eros, as source of moving life in 

4 "0 Bacchus, dweller in Thebes, mother-city of Bac- 
chants." "Of all cities, Thebes, thou holdest first in 
honor." "0 leader of the stars whose breath is fire, 
master of sounds of the night, son begotten of Zeus, 
appear, lord, with thy encircling Bacchantes who, in 
night-long frenzy dance to thee, the dispenser, Iacchus." 
1121-22; 1137-38; 1146-55 Antigone. 



118 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

nature, the magic workman of all growing 
tilings, the prosperer of the whole content 
of life, even of the exuberant pleasure that 
expresses itself in dancing and in every joy. 
His abundance of vitality made him a pro- 
tector from daemons. Inevitably his cult 
tended to the matriarchal — a religion finding 
root in the worship of Mother Earth and her 
Son, the fruit thereof. With legends at those 
times still in popular survival and also in ac- 
cord with the breadth and inclusiveness of a 
matriarchal cult, it recognized women's natu- 
ral piety and susceptibility to extreme emo- 
tion. Women were ministrants — the mae- 
nads, distinguished votaries of Dionysus, pos- 
sibly survivals of the then far-ancient minis- 
trants called Amazons and their rites in the 
service of Earth Mother. 

Adoption of the Dionysus religion and its 
development as a public cult proved in the end 
a mighty impulse to Hellas. Art opened a 
perfect form in the worship. That very all- 
inclusive beauty of Greek poetry, tragedy, 
grew, perhaps, out of a masque of the seasons 
in which the god was slain and lamented by 
mummers clad in goat-skins. And Attic 
comedy, it has been suggested, evolved pos- 



DIONYSUS: ORPHISM 119 

sibly from a purificatory rite when bearers of 
symbols of fertility came through the central 
cloor of the theater at the festival of Lenaea 
and reviled certain of the audience. 

Orphism had substantial foundation in 
Greece before the sixth century before Christ 
— a century curiously fertile in religious 
manifestations in lands far east of Greece. 
But when Onomacritus, a singer of Bacchic 
initiation songs and with Pherecydes of Syros 
founder of the Orphic brotherhood at Athens, 
dwelt as a guest at the court of Peisistratus — 
from this association the faith gained the sup- 
port of the state. The Peisistratid family 
personified the tyrannus idea at Athens. 
Orphism and the tyrannus went hand in hand, 
not only at Athens but at Corinth, Sicyon and 
elsewhere. The religion was a reflex as well 
as a cause of the condition into which society 
had come. Both religion and social condi- 
tion were antagonistic to the old traditions. 
Both voiced the same social consciousness and 
the same social divisions and both recognized 
the people of towns and tillers of the soil. 
The nether orders, called "lower" because 
others rear their structure upon their 
strength, were asserting themselves and rig- 



120 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

ing to power in the affairs of life. Old gods 
had not redressed long-time inequalities or 
softened the hardness of the oligarchs. New, 
or renewed, gods might. 

Orphism cheered men by saying that each 
and every one could attain to divine life, to 
immortality. In an age when there survived 
the old teaching that it was heaven-storming 
insolence to seek to be a god, the individual- 
ism of Orphism gave courage to seek to be 
united to God those who were already God. 
Orphism taught in another way than the old 
epic the divinity of humanity. 

But Orphic puritanism, and the solidarity 
of the conventicle to which converts pledged 
themselves, did not wholly take the place of 
the old aristocrats ' Olympian religion. The 
old faith consecrated all ceremonial civic func- 
tions. Orphics still worshiped at the solemn 
old festivals of the gods which the state or- 
dained. 

In the older religion a tribe divinity had 
still the magnet of a tribe 's devotion, and the 
religious influence that adheres to such ideas. 
An instance most potent was a splendid festi- 
val held periodically at the island of Delos, all 
Ionic cities uniting in its imposing celebra- 



DIONYSUS: ORPHISM 121 

tion ; when, says an old hymn, one seeing the 
grace of all and rejoicing in their spirit, 
would call the assembled Ionians ageless and 
deathless, the men and the lovely belted 
woman. Dionysus came too late to become a 
communal forbear, to represent the projected 
consciousness of the old group. Orphics ob- 
served still, we say, old tribal and local loyal- 
ties and oblations. But Eros, passion-stir- 
ring, and Bacchus, vital principle, were their 
real gods. 

The old nobles ' religion had little expansive 
concern for immortality. Eealities on this 
earth prevailed. Content with their life as it 
was and for generations had been naturally 
filled the breasts of the ruling orders. 
Homeric ideas show traces of a doctrine of 
retribution. But the Orphic faith brought 
confidence in punishment of evil deeds and 
the rewards of righteousness. For the ills 
and inequalities of earth converts declared the 
glories of an everlasting bliss should be theirs. 
If a soul could not realize itself here — if on 
this earth vice had not its meed and virtue 
were its slave or dupe, if "Captive Good at- 
tending Captain 111" were ever true — the soul 
may turn its vision to another world for the 



122 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

balance of justice, the world after death. 
The gods would grant redress, would strike a 
balance, for the sufferings of the oppressed. 

Here is a distinct step in human evolution 
and mental refinement — since the ethical esti- 
mate of the heroic age, when gods were non- 
moral, to this phase of the Greek spirit when 
gods became guardians of righteousness. 
Justice and evolving conceptions of law stood 
among the great gods of the Orphic pantheon. 
Teachings of an implacable justice, the Hel- 
lenes' setting out of the Hebraic conception 
of the sins of father upon children, the early 
Solon sang in his elegies, "Fruits of insolence 
and wrong bring vengeance, sure even if 
slow. . . . Perhaps the guilt escapes, but his 
blameless children, or distant posterity pay 
the penalty. •' ' 

Orphic cosmogony pictured the becoming 
and growth of the world out of a dark, driving 
power into the clear, definite manif oldness of 
the cosmos — a long train of godlike forces 
winding and overwinding one another in the 
world's orderly formation. This teaching of 
the generation of the universe was like that 
of old religions, for instance, the Persian, to 
which Orphism was doubtless related. 



ELEUSINIAN MYSTERIES 123 

Such a faith had its historic mission. It 
succored the growth of men's conscience and 
deepened their inner life. It inculcated dis- 
dain for the goods and successes of the world 
which had been controlling — for renown, for 
war and its grossnesses. Another result was 
a gloom, an asceticism at odds with the old, 
commonly prevalent view of life as a buoyant 
beauty, a harmony. Ideas such as these are 
engendered and enunciated, it has been said, 
by a people who disavow power and force or, 
are without such factors. 

But the central and finally most popular 
worship of the Dionysus idea, that which 
probably more completely set forth the doc- 
trine and was not so much a mass of loosely 
united beliefs, a worship clearly allied to 
Orphism in secrecy, in revocation of the crea- 
tive impulse, in expiatory rites and purifica- 
tions, were the great Eleusinian Mysteries, a 
passion play sacred to divinities of the earth 
— a setting forth of the holy history of Hades' 
theft of Core, as she among meadow grasses 
gathered the strange flower of the narcissus ; 
the maid's translation to the god's realms be- 
low ; the wandering quest of her mother, De- 
meter, up and down the earth; the poignant 



124 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

sorrows of Mater Dolorosa ; and the final re- 
union of Mother and Child. ' i And, ' ' sang an 
old hymn, "Zeus decreed that Persephone 
should remain two parts of the year with her 
mother, and one third part only with her hus- 
band in the kingdom of the dead." 

The secret worship centering about this 
beautiful story fell near the end of our Sep- 
tember amid the agricultural people of the 
fertile plain of Eleusis, a little town hugging 
the sea-coast across from Salamis, some four- 
teen miles from Athens. There, legend told, 
Persephone had returned to her mother after 
she had come with Hermes from Hades' king- 
dom below. The rites, fabled to have been es- 
tablished by the Thracian Eumolpus, doubt- 
less dated to those pre-Greek days when 
Mother Earth was Great Goddess and every 
settlement of ^Egean folk had its Lady of the 
Corn, or of abundance of crops and fertility 
of flocks. 5 Demeter, sender-up of gifts, signi- 

5 Persistence of local cults among Mediterranean peo- 
ples has been through millennia and down to our own 
time. Demeter, not a personified principle but a real 
personal power, "the mistress of the world," a living, 
benevolent divinity dwelling in the heart of a mountain, 
is worshiped to this day in Greece. In the last cen- 
tury tillers of the soil, natives of this very plain of 



ELEUSINIAN MYSTERIES 125 

fied the earth, not the mere material of the 
earth-body — Gaia was that — but the lady-pro- 
ducer, the lady-nourisher of what grows out 
of the earth. Persephone, her daughter, was 
the seed corn and the fruit of the fields. The 
robbery of Core symbolized the sinking of 
seed corn in the earth ; her return the coming 
of the seed plant from the soil — the yearly 
going under and the renewing of vegetation. 

In their origin the rites were probably a 
celebration of a harvest festival, and magic 
ceremonies to further food supply. Such 
practices might also celebrate invigorating of 
life-force and the process of plowing and 
sowing. Profounder spiritual significance 
they might have gained in later times in 
elaboration of the cult of Dionysus. Iacchus, 
1 ' giver of wealth, ' 9 1 ' dispenser of men 's fate, ' ' 
as the vegetation god would be in the world, 
"daemon of Demeter, founder of the Mys- 

Eleusis, cherished a statue of Demeter after a Chris- 
tianized ritual naming it St. Demetra, a saint not in 
ecclesiastical canon and entirely unknown elsewhere. In 
his "Modern Greek Folklore and Ancient Greek Reli- 
gion," Mr. J. C. Lawson tells that the statue "in spite of 
a riot among the peasants of Eleusis" was removed and 
"is now a little-regarded object catalogued as 'No. XIV, 
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge (much mutilated)/ " 



126 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

teries, ' ' was an Eleusinian name of Dionysus, 
perhaps derived from his worshipers ' cry of 
joy. 

The religions pantomime of the Elensinian 
Mysteries was not the sole sacred drama in 
Hellas. Eepresentations of phases of the life 
of the gods, feasts to Zens, to Here, to Apollo 
were part of a widely distributed cult prac- 
tice, and mystery cults were potent, for in- 
stance, that of Hecate at .iEgina and of Ge at 
Phyle. The Eleusinian was distinctive 
through the outlook it gave its attendants. 
During the centuries of its most marked 
growth individuality in all relations was 
evolving. Contemplation of the fate of the 
seed corn personified in Persephone — the dis- 
appearance of the corn from the earth and its 
return — afforded insight into the destiny of 
the individual human soul, of man's birth and 
rebirth. In this we have the unity of the old 
Greek faith, that human life is not a segre- 
gated thing, but a part of the whole vegeta- 
tive and animal world. The soul disappears 
in order to live, just as the seed. 6 That was 

6 This meditation the zeal of Paul set down centuries 
later in a letter to Christian converts at Corinth, in sen- 
tences of remarkable beauty and the same analogical 



ELEUSINIAN MYSTERIES 127 

the sum of the sacred secret — the soul disap- 
pears in order to live. "The Athenians of 
old," said Plutarch, "called the dead Deme- 
ter's people' ' — people of Earth Mother. 

By the mystic, purificatory ceremony at 
Eleusis the worshiper of the solemn god- 
desses, the Mother and the Daughter, and 
their associated gods, for instance Triptole- 
mus, plower and distributer of grain for 
sowing, the initiate might hold privileged re- 
lations with the divinities, a communion, and 
hope for success in life and better fortune 
after death. ' ' Of men who go about upon the 
earth, he is happy who has seen these things," 
sang an old hymn of the worship, "He who 
has not shared in them has by no* means an 
equal fate in the gloom of the nether world. ' ' 
Not only that the soul freed from the body 
lives — brighter and more comforting thoughts 
of how she will live these Mysteries taught 
men. That is, the initiate won at Eleusis a 
lively setting forth of the existence of the de- 
parted soul "being god-beloved and dwelling 
with the gods." 

Originally a tribal privilege, probably an 

reasoning; "That which thou sowest is not quickened ex- 
cept it die," etc. 



128 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

occasion when each member of the group so- 
cialized his soul by pledging it to the soul of 
the congregation, the Mysteries in the fifth 
century before Christ invited the whole Hel- 
lenic world to share their spiritual life. 
Their membership became widespread, and 
they had long-continued reverence. Initia- 
tion was only by the individual's free act and 
election. The candidates, who had had in- 
struction from the leader of the Mysteries and 
introduction to the Lesser Mysteries months 
before, must confess themselves to be pure in 
hand, that is, with no blood guiltiness, and 
they should have followed rules of abstinence 
and fasting. "Let no one enter,' ' read a 
solemn proclamation used at one time, 
"whose hands are not clean and whose tongue 
is not prudent. ' ' 

Upon assembling the candidates must go 
to the seashore to purify themselves with salt 
water, a baptism or laver of regeneration. A 
cathartic ritual, sprinkling with the blood of a 
pig — and possibly a pig because the sow had 
been a symbol of fertility — may then have 
followed. After a sacrifice, perhaps, and an 
interval of two days, the great procession 
started from Athens to Eleusis bearing a 



ELEUSINIAN MYSTERIES 129 

representation of the god Iacchus. With 
shrines to visit on the way, and with sacri- 
fices, their march mnst have been slow. They 
wonld reach Eleusis on the same night, or on 
the following, fatigued, in that state of body 
when through fasting and ritual the mind 
would be given to hallucination. Under the 
stars with Iacchus there followed a midnight 
meeting, and, in the Mystery hall (Ictinus, 
architect of the Parthenon, built later the 
splendid temple of Demeter) two or more 
days of sacred drama. 

The eight priests and priestesses of the 
ceremonies may at this time have given an ap- 
pealing play of the taking away of Core, the 
sorrow of the Mother, the reunion of the two, 
the mission of Triptolemus. That is, the play 
may have symbolized the poetry of nature, 
the drama each year enacts during spring, 
summer and winter. And thus it may have 
taught of human life, and poetized the hope of 
a world where death gives place to life. 
The very character of mystery — reserve for 
the initiate — keeps us from exact knowledge 
of what was done. 

Perhaps the drama pictured, through the 
loss of the Daughter, separation by death, the 



130 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

sorrow of the living, the consoling faith of an 
ultimate reunion. In this way the soul, feel- 
ing a personal communion with the divine 
would be purified and lifted to a new life. It 
is difficult to believe any part of the solemni- 
ties to have been obscene, as early Christian 
writers averred. When the Hellenes said 
they were ' ' unspeakable ' ' they meant not un- 
namably impure, but unnamably and mys- 
teriously holy. They appealed to and com- 
forted most refined minds. If they repre- 
sented a union of the human and divine, a 
pledge of intimate association with immortals 
in another world, the fasting and reduction 
of the body's normal strength at their rites 
may have led to reaction, excess, afterwards — 
just as at the fast of Eamazan the Moham- 
medan's self-restraint of the day gives way 
to indulgence in nightly feasts, or as our 
present-day Lenten denials generate ab- 
normal feasts at Easter. 

"Demeter . . . gave our ancestors twofold 
gifts," said Isocrates in his Panegyricus, 
" those fruits of the earth which saved us 
from living the life of wild beasts, and the 
rites which make happier the sharers of it, 
both concerning the end of life and existence 



ELEUSINIAN MYSTERIES 131 

forever." "When we die," wrote Plutarch 
much later, yet bearing the faith of a believer, 
"we are like those being initiated into the 
Mystery. . . . Our whole life is but a succes- 
sion of wanderings, of painful goings about, 
of journeys by devious ways with no outlet. 
At the moment of quitting it, fears, horrors, 
palpitations, deathly sweats and stupor come 
upon and overwhelm us. But as soon as we 
are past it, pure places and meadows open 
to us, with voices and dances and sacred 
words and holy sights. There a man having 
become initiate and perfect, free and lord of 
self, celebrates, crowned with myrtle, most 
solemn mysteries, converses with righteous 
and pure souls, looking down upon the im- 
pure numbers of the uninitiate sinking in the 
mire and fog beneath — by fear of death and 
by lack of faith in a life to come abiding in 
their miseries." 

In the mystic celebration the Eumolpidse 
preserved rights of apostolic succession 
from the founder. From that family was 
chosen an official who, clad in rich rai- 
ment, acted as Hierophantes, the word mean- 
ing one who shows forth sacred things. 
Consecrated to his function for life, and in 



132 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

later generations vowed to celibacy and con- 
tinual chastity, he alone could enter inmost 
penetralia of the hall of the Mysteries. Any 
candidate his holiness thought unfit for the 
communion he might refuse. 

With the assurance of fixed, religious or- 
ganizations, the sentiment doubtless dating 
back to early group-feeling, the Eleusinian 
community came to divide mankind into two 
classes — the pure, those initiate of the 
Eleusinian rites, and the mass not initiate. 
Mankind was not divided into the good and 
wicked, another has pointed out. Not as hu- 
man beings, and not as virtuous and pious 
human beings should men and women expect 
a happy life in the world to come — rather 
only as members of the Eleusinian company 
of worshipers and participators in the Eleu- 
sinian services. Ethical merit, the merit of a 
citizen of ideal type, had in that estimate lit- 
tle accounting. Obedience to ritualistic form- 
ulas, the visionary merit of union with the 
body, alone determined — a recrudescence, 
again we say, or survival of the old, dominat- 
ing soul of the group. Happiness, an initiate 
declares in the quotation above, was in pros- 
pect for members of the sacred mystery only. 



ELEUSINIAN MYSTERIES 133 

Tliey alone dared entertain pious expecta- 
tions of a real life hereafter. They alone 
might have the serenity of true expectancy, a 
privilege gained in no other way than through 
sharing the celebration and partaking of the 
blessed feast of fellowship, wheat cakes or 
bread sacred to Demeter and wine dedicated 
to Dionysus. Eeligion, so far as this popu- 
lar sense went, was merely an otiose assent 
to prevailing forms and symbols. Purifica- 
tion by ritual doubtless had its origin in 
magic, — in an elaboration in approaching the 
unseen superhuman power and then a substi- 
tution of the form of approach for the power 
itself. But such purification may have led to 
some degree of purification by ethical ideals. 
"There is sure and joyous light to us alone/ ' 
sang the song which Dionysus heard in the 
meadows of the Blessed, "to us who have 
been initiated and have lived reverently to- 
wards strangers and private folk." 

The practical irreasons of the faith were a 
reaction from the old heroic independence 
and the sanity of the Hellenic mind. Homer 
was far from vaunting expiatory ceremonies, 
mystic rites and religious brotherhoods. He 
refers to few superstitions. Perchance their 



134 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

magic had little ascendence among the folk 
for whom he sang. 

If the simple, primal consciousness of the 
old Greeks of the epic age was broken, the in- 
dividual, isolated soul certainly counted for 
more than when the king of sacrifices stood 
before the more physical gods of Olympus and 
voiced his community's consciousness of the 
human and divine. Now a pious man must 
look for soul-help in the ritual and observ- 
ance of an externalized order. He had need 
of a larger revelation and the mediation of a 
greater master, of some mystery, some magic, 
outside his group's, to show the way to the 
soul's hale. The Mysteries brought the 
proclamation to the world, said a decree of 
the second century before Christ, "that the 
greatest good among men is fellowship and 
faith." 

In the spiritual development of a people 
supernatural therapeutics, wonder-working 
and exorcism long forerun the philosophers. 
Practices of magic and witchcraft and purifi- 
catory superstitions are of earlier ages; or 
of a substratum of the people of later times — 
long practiced in secret and at some favor- 
ing juncture taking on vigor in open air. 



PRACTICES OF MAGIC: SUPERSTITIONS 135 

Now, in Hellas, sorceries were not a sudden 
growth or arbitrary invention. They were 
doubtless deep rooted in long anterior centu- 
ries and had been men's resort to the superhu- 
man for the guidance of life. Possibly in 
these times they suffered a renewal of 
strength through crises in the people's life, 
and in that ineradicable human feeling that 
would pry into and divine the future and en- 
deavor to avert its possible evil. Dionysus, 
the earth-sap god, the granter of ecstasy, was 
also a healer, an inpourer of the power of 
soothsaying. 

During the waxing of Hellenic society in 
these individualizing centuries — from scat- 
tered dwellers over the face of a country and 
in the bonds of patriarchal kingdoms to the 
unity of vigorous, sizable cities and sanitary 
care necessary where people are grouped to- 
gether, cleansing and purification became 
needful in the same ratio that human life 
grew in esteem and preciousness. Disease, 
unseen, lurking endemic pests engendered by 
the crowding together of men, denser popula- 
tion in our present-day phrase, must have 
struck the Greeks with a bold hand in their 
town building and then unknowledge of sani- 



136 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

tation. As in the Iliad the plague witnessing 
divine anger at Agamemnon's sin made puri- 
fication necessary, so now in many places 
some malefic god was at hand, some daemon 
of the earth or underworld, whose works 
were turned by ceremonialism and magic 
of fumigation and fire, who also de- 
parted after ablution. Beating of bronze 
clappers, cymbals, freed from hostile, inter- 
ruptive daemons the spirit that makes crops 
grow, just as, it has been said, the gong in the 
grove at Dodona preserved by its continuous 
clang the sacred ground from malignant in- 
fluences. 7 Thus these folk imaginatively 
traced origin with a glimmer of light, and 
science gleams in the midst of ancient charla- 
tanry. In considering their practices we 
must not forget that between magic, depend- 
ence upon a supernatural power for guid- 
ance, and religion, there is only the distinc- 
tion of growth, both being phases of reliance 
on or union with a supreme power. 

7 By the same token bells were a prophylactic for they 
inspired terror in evil spirits. Therefore, in later cen- 
turies, the Christian church hung them in their towers, 
where they pealed at the passing of a soul and in their 
call defended the congregation from ill. 



PRACTICES OF MAGIC: SUPERSTITIONS 137 

From Crete, an ancient home of thau- 
maturgy for ^Egean peoples, Thaletas came 
to Lacedaemon to rid the Spartans of a 
plague through his music and hymns to the 
gods, 8 and at Athens the Cretan Epimenides, 
an ally of Solon, healed the people of a pesti- 
lence and despondency and salutarily lifted 
their hearts. Many a small stream of ex- 
purgatory rites and demonology flowed into 
and colored the larger stream of Greek re- 
ligion. 

When, we say, with grouping of humans in 
cities need of cleansing from defilement cried 
aloud, mental confusion as to cause of pollu- 
tion led doubtless to a reinvigoration of the 
exorcist and to practices of magic in cleans- 
ing from imaginary defilement — to cere- 
monies of cursing to avert evil luck and bring 
good ; freeing the habitation, the doorpost, the 
field, from vague, malevolent bogeys and 
ghosts ; to ridding from pollution the person 
of the newborn child and the mother after 
the birth of the child; to magnetizing the 
weather to drive away disease. Ker was a 
generic name of this corrupting thing, this 

8 To-day peoples of Calabria free themselves from 
earthquake by like processes. 



138 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

fate of death, this bacillus of disease. The 
word also meant ancestral ghost. Fantastic 
expiation freed the murderer from blood- 
guiltiness, and afflicted men might purify 
themselves from daemons. 

From the eighth to the sixth century men 
and women prophets, exorcists and purifiers, 
often degraders of Orphic precepts, seizing 
upon the mental nervousness and supersti- 
tions of the weaker, wandered through 
Greece. Their very being evidences the 
spread of a mysticism, the endeavor of a 
people burdened with the ills of their un- 
settled life, pulsing with the effort to pass 
the narrow horizon of every-day conscious- 
ness to the heights of unbounded vision and 
communion with the divine. 

Eeligious doctrines we have considered sub- 
jected their initiate to rule and symbol. 
Like all symbolic religions they promoted the 
idea that observance of forms and ceremonies 
would wipe away moral consciousness of sin — 
nay, even sin itself. Consequently, but still 
later than this age, for Plato tells of it, a 
sorcery so un-Hellenic, gross and grotesque 
gained way that certain mystagogues, mendi- 
cant friars and soothsayers peddled to the 



PRACTICES OF MAGIC: SUPERSTITIONS 139 

doors of the rich, and even to Greek cities, 
power to heal in agreeable way of sacrifice 
and rite whatever sin burdened the soul — ■ 
promising absolution, effective both in this 
world and the next, a patent spiritual nos- 
trum to protect the soul from a wrath which 
their Hellenic sense of justice meted should 
come. "They redeem us from the pains of 
hell ; if we neglect them, no one knows what is 
waiting for us." 

Among the confused and bizarre and non- 
Hellenic powers in this current of imposture 
was Hecate of the three-fold form, daughter 
of the sky of night, mother of midnight ter- 
rors, dwelling in the underworld, who found 
her way to the abode of the living more lightly 
than other nether-abode dwellers. She was 
by when a soul bound itself to a body, and 
even at the birth of wild animals. When 
a soul parted from its body she was also there. 
She was goddess of souls bound to another 
world. Her haunts were gravestones, and 
the solemn honors of the cult of the dead. 
The half-light of the moon, with which lumi- 
nary she had some occult connection, showed 
her course by night. She flitted over cross- 
roads. There stood her image; and also be- 



140 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

fore thresholds of houses to ward off evil 
spirits. At the forking of three ways, likely 
spot for ghosts, was also her worship. In 
haunted places she was invoked for her 
power to send from the earth horrid forms. 
Souls whose burial had been unattended by 
holy rites were her servitors, or those •who 
used violence in life or died before their 
time — souls that find no peace after death 
but whirl in the wind with this magical, spell- 
binding goddess and her troop of daemon 
dogs, bringing epilepsy, madness, disease, to 
whomsoever they meet. 

This and kindred legends — the "under- 
world' ' of the intellect of that time, the 
nether side of the beauty and brightness that 
was distinguishing its progress — doubtless 
voiced a people and their magic at the time 
of their inception. They voice fear. In the 
religion of monarchies of Babylon and As- 
syria in the time of the magic's seeming re- 
vival, a potent factor was fear of swarming, 
malignant beings of grotesque shape, delete- 
rious and destructive to human life, always 
on the watch to undo unguarded mortals. In 
the Hellenes ■ us.e the legends bear also an- 
other witness — the conception of the interde- 



BEGINNINGS OF PHILOSOPHY 141 

pendence of all being and growth — a convic- 
tion often allowing itself expression in terms 
of the night-side of nature. 



EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY, AND PHYSICS 
FORECASTING MODERN SCIENCE 

Another mark of this second phase of the 
Greek spirit — of the reflection with which the 
Greek began to consider life and the world 
and their problems — is found in the begin- 
nings of philosophy. The human spirit, in 
other than social and religious phases, joys 
in new regions and a growing consciousness 
of self. It essays another form akin to re- 
ligion in conception, aim and comprehensive- 
ness. To the thinker the universe must be 
fresh-born, as to colonists of active life ex- 
ploring untried seas and penetrating prime- 
val forests. New perceptions must combine 
and set out experiences afresh. The world 
must have a simple, rational explanation ; life, 
a profound and self -satisfying aim. 

Search for truth and that noble wisdom 
whose fruits are reverence and calm seized 
upon men's souls as a great enthusiasm. 
The world is wide and wonderful, and those 



142 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

early thinkers of Hellas could little see how 
long would be their search — and, forsooth, 
the search of man for many centuries to fol- 
low. It was the hope of every wisdom-lover 
to solve the great evanishing mystery. What 
the primordial source from which all came? 
How reduce endless variety — change, change 
— to unity? And man's relations to this va- 
riety — what are the laws and what transcend- 
ent truth? What is the spiritual light for 
things as we see them — for the world of 
nature ? 

Earnestness made the Greeks seekers. We 
know attempted answers of theirs. The 
more we ponder, the profounder is our as- 
tonishment at their magnificently prophetic 
outlines. Modern science seems in many 
ways but the larger reading of those old 
philosophies. With the sympathy and per- 
ception with which in the long past their race 
had from the mysterious beauties of the 
earth, and its ensphering universe, evolved 
their objective religion and bred their epic 
art, so now the Hellenes incarnated scientific 
analysis of nature. That is, that energy of 
the imagination which had wrought lasting 
work in epic song, and in a poetic, synthetic 



BEGINNINGS OF PHILOSOPHY 143 

religion, now turned its insight to analytic, 
scientific enquiry and bore fruitful forecasts 
in more formal divisions. Science is a 
younger-born sister of poetry. The history 
of the Hellenes ' science affords authoritative 
data in tracing their evolution. That which 
we call their philosophy is an imagination, a 
vision of life of certain of their seers — in 
which vision reason, thought, imagination, 
dominate rather than the emotion. 

The imaginative reasoning of those Greek 
penetrators led them to their belief in the 
indestructibility of matter, and in the ex- 
istence of elements — they went so far in con- 
ception as to seek to reduce all diverse things 
they saw to some fundamental element. 
They felt the unity under multiplicity that 
modern science proclaims, the common sub- 
stance and the aspiring law that draws chaos 
to cosmos. We can not generalize their en- 
deavors, their individuality forbids. Let us 
glance at a few of their efforts seriatim. 

The first cradle of this new reflection of the 
Greeks was the coast of Asia Minor. Eound 
the name of Thales of Miletus (said to have 
been born 640 B. C.) group reports of dis- 
coveries. In putting his efforts in the field 



144 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

of sensible phenomena he showed the racial 
character of his fellow Ionians. In his at- 
tempts to explain the world, the Hellenes ' 
abiding love of science. 

Matter was to Thales a living thing. It 
was endowed with energy, and motion was a 
result of life. There is an indwelling soul — 
"all things are full of gods," he said. This 
suggests the modern " prepotency,' ' "inter- 
nal, perfecting principle.' ' A divine power 
pervades the elementary moisture and gives 
it motion. All things are therefore water 
variously transformed and capable of trans- 
formation. Thales came to this fundamental 
dogma, suggests Aristotle, by observation of 
the part warm, damp, organic matter plays 
in the production and keeping of life. 

This philosopher of Miletus is said to have 
introduced geometry into Greece, to have 
determined that the angles at the base of 
an isosceles triangle are equal and that the 
circle is bisected by its diameter. Before 
his time the Egyptians had gained the ele- 
ments of geometry in measuring lands made 
fertile by the floods of the Nile. Again 
Thales had such wisdom of the stars that he 
could and did predict a total eclipse — which 



BEGINNINGS OF PHILOSOPHY 145 

occurred in the war between Lydia and Media 
on the 28th of May, 585 B. C. But already 
the Chaldeans, thinking the stars in their 
clear sky above were in harmony with human 
affairs below, and that it were possible to 
solve enigmata of the earth by motions in the 
heavens, had blazed a trail in stellar myster- 
ies and in quest of pseudo-astrology had 
found laws of astronomy. 

Anaximander, coming a generation after 
Thales, holding to the doctrine that matter is 
by nature endowed with life, reasoned that 
the first principle is the infinite, without be- 
ginning and without end, at once material and 
divine, his anecpov. Each separate exist- 
ence, an upstart, must in equity decline in a 
world in which antagonism and mutual ex- 
termination prevail. The independent, pri- 
mary substance again and again absorbs such 
existences, and another process of individuali- 
zation follows. This echoes of the Orphics 
and betrays a moral and religious suggestion. 
From anztpov, without beginning and with- 
out end, warm and cold, moist and dry, pro- 
gressively differentiate. 

Anaximander declared, although with much 
that was crudest in cosmogony, that the 



146 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

earth had in cosmic periods been in a fluid 
state, that under the beneficence of warmth, 
living beings gradually developed in the sea- 
slime, that land animals in the beginning had 
the form of fishes and upon the drying of the 
surface of the earth — at many places he had 
seen the retreating of the Mediterranean — 
they took on their land form. At the begin- 
ning man was generated from all kinds of 
animals; all the rest can quickly get food for 
their nourishment, but man alone for a long 
time needs careful feeding, and could not at 
the beginning have preserved his life. 

Such startling forecasts of our science had 
Anaximander (said to have been born in the 
year 611 B.C.), in Miletus, at his time the 
greatest of Greek cities, a vast market of the 
seafaring Ionians, where the rich valley of 
the Menander ends at the sea. 

But the tenure of such a dogma as that of 
Thales concerning primary matter must be 
slight. Why not some other pervasive ele- 
ment! With Thales and Anaximander mat- 
ter held within itself the cause of its own 
motion. Anaximenes, again of Miletus and 
after Anaximander and reported his pupil, 
held air, infinite in extent, nearest to an im- 



BEGINNINGS OF PHILOSOPHY 147 

material thing, before all bodies as their 
first, animating principle. By a certain con- 
densation and rarefaction of it arise the 
things that have come and are coming into 
existence, and the things that will be. This 
introduction of spatial relations in particles 
is said to have forecast our modern atomic 
theory. As our soul which is air holds us to- 
gether, so breath and air encompass the 
whole world, he declared. Like Anaximan- 
der, peering into the dark, penetrated with 
yearning to see the reasons for phenomena 
about him, Anaximenes essayed guesses the 
significance of which astonishes moderns. 

Then came Heraclitus, the wide-eyed, whose 
proud and solitary mind — ' ' to me one man is 
ten thousand, if he be the best" — fertilizes 
to this day. ' ' This world-order, the same for 
all things, no god nor man made; but it al- 
ways was, and is, and ever shall be, an ever- 
living fire lighted according to measure and 
quenched according to measure." Thought- 
endowed, primordial fire is the conscious 
principle of the world, the eternal reason 
whose harmony constitutes the universal law. 
From primary substance of purest light or 
fire — an engendering, and consuming energy 



148 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

— in up-building and down-tearing, individ- 
uals come forth. ' ' All things flow J ' ; " all ob- 
jects are at all times moving" — modern sci- 
ence tells of constant, molecular action, and 
also of "transmutation of elements." Alter- 
ation in things as they are, fashioning by 
slow development, and adaptation to new con- 
ditions is the law. 

Opposition unites; "all things have their 
birth in strife, and out of discord arises fair- 
est harmony." Finite things resolve them- 
selves into the first principle. Human law is 
nurtured by one fundamental, divine law 
which is for all time. "God does all things 
with a view to the harmony of the whole. ' ' 

Because of his use of the word logos, A6yo<;, 
word, which meant to the Greeks power of 
speech and so persuasion, reason, an inter- 
posing, intermediate agent between man and 
man, and so between man and God, a medi- 
ator, an active spiritual (possibly also mate- 
rial) being to intervene and connect the Eter- 
nal and the sense-world of man — because 
of Heraclitus' use of logos in describing 
the world-order, the cosmos — the philosopher 
has through Christian centuries enjoyed 
orthodox approval. "They who have lived 



BEGINNINGS OF PHILOSOPHY 149 

in company with the Logos are Christians, ' ' 
says Justin Martyr, "even if they were ac- 
counted atheists. And such among the 
Greeks were Socrates and Heraclitus." 

Here and now Heraclitus, and the other 
natural philosophers, restated for their age 
what the heroic Greek in his religion had 
centuries before stated for his own — the iden- 
tity of the universe, faith in its uniformity 
and in its laws. Eeligious awe and sense of 
moral order was with these Greeks in their 
speculation. 

The plasticity of the early Greek concep- 
tions had passed. Days when poetry alone 
should rule were fast passing. Philosophers 
began as physicists and cosmologists. It was 
not long before they set out an ethical bear- 
ing. They gave attributes and functions to 
the first element they sought which before and 
afterwards men ascribed to Deity. Orphism 
was in their midst ; their enunciations now 
and then show Orphic influence. 

By the gifts of many minds a moral code 
was gradually forming. To meet the growth 
of his time Heraclitus declared virtue to lie 
in "following the universal," the subjection 
of the individual to the law. In the universal 



150 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

reason is true freedom. "Not from me, but 
from truth, it is wise for you to agree that 
all things are one." Character, ethos, >J#oc, 
says Heraclitus, is a guardian divinity to a 
man. 

Thus those early philosophers of the Hel- 
lenes were teachers. They set out ideas 
which groped forward and foreran modern 
theories as to the derivation of the world 
from primeval nebulae, and also moral con- 
ceptions still further to evolve and to mature. 

Another of their number, drawn to Crotona 
perhaps by popular characteristics of a city 
distinguished for the number of its citizens 
who had won victory at the Olympic games, 
and for the excellence of its physicians, 
Pythagoras settled in southern Italy in the 
year circum 529 B. C. A colony of Aehaeans 
had founded the town, and the whole amal- 
gamated into one body in which the sternness 
and severity of the Dorian character super- 
vened. The Dorian conception that there 
was no health of the people nor of the state 
without the lordship of ethics, offered ready 
opportunity for a brotherhood which should 
aim at " release,' ' Mm?, the purification of 
the community, the moral salvation of the 



BEGINNINGS OF PHILOSOPHY 151 

people and the establishment of civic order. 
Such an ethical association Pythagoras 
founded. With its practical puritan force, 
its abstinence, its intrepidity, its religious ex- 
altation, its matriarchal conceptions spring- 
ing from Orphism and including women in its 
workers, the union met immediate success. 
Proselytes took up work for the city's needs 
— man is born into a world of order and is 
made for, and a part of, order. 

To enter the association the disciple must 
undergo examination and bind himself to un- 
conditional submission and obedience. He 
must subject himself daily to rigorous self- 
examination as to his temperance, his rever- 
ence, justice, purity of life, and prayer. Sim- 
plicity must mark his dress, and of animal 
food he may partake only in obedience to 
certain injunctions. His soul dwells in his 
body as in a prison. Like the stars it is sub- 
ject to eternal motion and cyclic succession. 

The teaching of Pythagoras that the body 
is the house or tomb of the soul, his idea of 
the soul's purification and wandering may 
have their origin in Orphism. Contrast be- 
tween earthly suffering and imperfection, and 
heavenly bliss and consummation, are the 



152 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

core of Orphisro. and Pythagoreanisni. In 
the Greek cities of lower Italy and Sicily 
Orphic religion nnited with, or was a part of 
the blossoming Pythagoreanism in the last 
of the sixth and first of the fifth centnry be- 
fore Christ. Bnt whether Pythagoras fonnd 
Orphism in Crotona when he reached Italy, 
and nnited his teachings with their ways of 
thinking, or whether the Orphics are indebted 
to Pythagoras and his followers is not known. 
With, the practicality of the townspeople's 
blood he applied philosophy to men's lives 
and adjnsted it to men's relation to the state. 
He did for the community what Orphism had 
done for the individual and with the direct- 
ness and confidence of ethical conviction. 

Pythagoras, Heraclitns said in his own 
time, was famed for his studies. He may 
have obtained ideas first hand from Egypt 
and the East. In the intellectual ferment of 
that day of the Pan jab Luther, Buddha, and 
other religionists, the old oriental teachings 
of metempsychosis, the circle of births, may 
have made its way to his west. It was the 
age of Cyrus the Great when Indian nations 
as well as Greek fell under the Persian sway. 

In after centuries the asceticism and mys- 



BEGINNINGS OF PHILOSOPHY 153 

ticism of the Pythagoreans went far. Habit 
of self-examination among them led to each 
asking himself at the fall of every night, 
' ' How have I sinned V ' " What dnty have I 
left undone ? ' ' Lacedaemonians of the time of 
Plato were adepts in Pythagoreanism, and 
the moral loftiness of the Essenes brother- 
hood, in times and peoples immediately pre- 
ceding Christ, possibly refer to Pythagorean- 
ism absorbed by the Jew when he came in 
contact with Greek thought. In the Essenes 
community the Jew carried out the idea with 
his race's practical, intensive and dramatic 
fervor. 

Pythagoreanism again in its principle of 
number and of music, was pronouncedly Do- 
rian. Number and proportion Pythagoras 
found in everything that is known. Dis- 
covery of the principle, in acoustics, of the 
dependence of the pitch of sound on the 
length of the vibrating chord led him to such 
fanciful excesses that he pronounced the prin- 
ciple of numbers, themselves, the very essence 
of things, not predicates. The rule of uni- 
versal law in number he averred is the prin- 
ciple under which a world subsists in order. 

Still other inroads showed the working of 



154 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

the penetrating Greek spirit. The critical 
thinking of Xenophanes born (abont 580 
B. C.) at Colophon near Ephesns had its ori- 
gin in his becoming conscious of this following 
law. But first let us recall that his brother 
Greeks, ' ' taught vain luxury by the Lydians, ' ' 
he said, " go to the market place with haughty 
looks, wearing purple robes, proud of their 
comely hair anointed with curious unguents ' ' 
— the Asiatic Greeks were never so marked 
with steadfast courage as their cousins of the 
European Greek countries. The poignant 
sorrow of Xenophanes when he witnessed the 
wiping out of the freedom of his brother 
Ionians, and what he deemed their cringing 
before their victor, Cyrus the Conqueror, led 
to his conclusion that his people's thinking 
must be wrong, if they could endure loss of 
freedom. That is the law: — If they can en- 
dure loss of freedom, a people's thinking 
must be wrong. He must instruct. 

Thus at last he came, an aged minstrel, 
after wide wandering finally to dwell in the 
Greek city of Elea in southern Italy, affirm- 
ing against the gods of Olympus of common 
report, "There is one God, among gods and 
men greatest, neither in form like mortals, 



BEGINNINGS OF PHILOSOPHY 155 

nor in mind"; "The Whole sees, the Whole 
thinks, the Whole hears. . . . Without labor 
he rules all things by the purpose of his 
mind." Xenophanes taught worship of na- 
ture, an everlasting World God. He would 
free men's imagination in religion, would re- 
cast their ideas. 

Among the people was working doubt of 
the genuineness of the myths. Those gener- 
ations had out-grown the gods who had satis- 
fied the world-conceptions of their forebears. 
"Men imagine gods are born," further said 
Xenophanes, "to have clothing and voice and 
body like our own. " " The Ethiopians make 
their gods flat-nosed and black, the Thracians 
red-haired and blue-eyed. " " Oxen, lions and 
horses, if they had hands to write and do the 
work of men, would make the semblance of 
the gods and their bodies, each after his 
own body. ' ' But Xenophanes still used poly- 
theistic language. "In the beginning the 
gods did not show all things to mortals: by 
searching men find out a better way. ' ' With 
other Greek philosophers he may have re- 
garded the popular gods as but one point of 
view of the World God. 

Originally the making of gods in their own 



156 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

image was a gain. It softened the early 
Greeks who saw the god, one spirit with him- 
self, in bush and fountain and sky. But 
crystallization of the idea, led sometimes to 
petty formalizing of the imagination, and 
ultimately to loss of mystery and dignity. 

Of the daily conduct of life Xenophanes 
said, "If one won a victory by swiftness of 
feet, or in the contest of the five exercises, 
where the grove of Zeus lies by Pisa's stream 
in Olympia, or as a wrestler, or in sharp box- 
ing, or in that severe contest combining 
both wrestling and boxing, he would be more 
glorious in the eyes of citizens, and would 
win a front seat at assemblies and have his 
food from the public store, and a gift which 
would be a treasure to him from the city. If 
he won with horses, he would get all these 
things, although not deserving them as I de- 
serve them. Our wisdom is better than the 
strength of men or of horses. It is not just 
to prefer strength of body to goodly wisdom. 
For if among the people were one good at 
boxing, or in the live exercises, or in wres- 
tling, or in swiftness . . . not on account of 
that would the city have good laws obeyed." 

From the imprint of sea-animals and shells 



BEGINNINGS OF PHILOSOPHY 157 

found in Paros, and fish in the quarries of 
Syracuse, this geologist, one of the first, 
reasoned that the sea had covered the land at 
one time, when the imprint was made on 
mud, and had receded through geologic ages. 

To the theological speculations of Xenoph- 
anes, Parmenides of Elea, his younger con- 
temporary, succeeded in his theory of the 
One, Being, knowledge of which, that is truth 
of which, we can find by thought. "There 
remains but one word of the way, ' ' said Par- 
menides, "that Being is. And on this way 
are many evidences that Being is without 
birth and without death, that it is universal 
and alone — existent, without motion and in- 
finite. Neither ever was it, nor will it be, 
since it now is all together, one, continuous. 
For what generation of it wilt thou seek out? 
How and whence did it increase! That it 
came from not-being I will not permit thee to 
say or to think. ... So it is necessary that 
Being either absolutely is or is not." Plu- 
rality is an empty show and does not exist, 
but by deception of the senses seems to be 
true. 

Parmenides, with Xenophanes and the 
younger Zeno, induced a spirit of criticism 



158 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

upon all thought that had preceded them. 
In his cosmogonic speculation Parmenides 
taught the earth to be a globe, and he elabo- 
rated the theory of the earth's zones. In 
that part of his teachings which were phys- 
ical he voiced the Pythagoreans of whose 
brotherhood he was an associate. 

In this period the large and rational curios- 
ity of the Hellene, his vivid, intellectual vigor, 
his quick perception and agile, imaginative, 
awe-inspired mind embraced the universe. 
In asking the question of himself and of the 
world about him that all enquiring and sift- 
ing and analytic systems of regarding life 
ask, he essayed to find his own answer. His 
philosophers started out with the conception 
that life is inseparable from matter. They 
went on from the region of the senses to the 
region of abstraction till, as we see, in Elea 
they came to the most abstruse conception of 
Being. 

The Zeno of Elea referred to, a pupil of 
Parmenides and called double-tongued, de- 
veloped in his disputation for the discovery 
of truth that negative force of the dialectic 
method, that probing, questioning, mental at- 
titude, unmasking the pretentious and false, 



BEGINNINGS OF PHILOSOPHY 159 

that was to reach its perfection later in 
Socrates and to mark Greek thought for all 
time. 

To the Ionian Anaxagoras and his majestic 
hypothesis in science remained the determin- 
ing, regnant, world-ordering Mind or nous, 
vouz, subtlest and finest of things, that which 
arranges and is the cause of all things, bound- 
less and self-governed, unmixed with mate- 
rial nature and subject only to itself — all 
knowledge, all power, all reason, all order, 
all simplicity. Our senses are too weak to 
know the truth. The external world we know 
by the mind; all things the divine reason 
knows. The nous of Anaxagoras was dis- 
tinctively what in later times men called God. 
"All things were together; then Eeason came 
and set them in order," said Anaxagoras. 
The Hebrews told the tale in other words, 
"And the earth was without form, and void; 
and darkness was upon the face of the deep: 
and the Spirit of God moved upon the face of 
the waters." 

The rigidity and assumed infallibility of 
the theories of Anaxagoras contrasted 
sharply with the mental suppleness and plia- 
bility of others in the Athens of his day. Still 



160 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

he typed the investigator, and of him Euripi- 
des is supposed to have sung when he wrote, 
" Happy the man who is zealous for knowl- 
edge gained by enquiry, who hastens himself 
neither about the woes of citizens, nor toward 
unjust deeds, but views the order that waxes 
not old, the order of deathless nature — 
whence it arose, the how and the why. Near 
such a man the practice of shameful deeds 
never sits." 

But speculation upon how and why this 
world came, its law, its beauty, its woe, had 
not stopped here. The picturesque Empedo- 
cles, traveling through Sicily in such milli- 
nery as purple vestments bound to his form 
by a golden girdle, his head laureled, his feet 
sandaled in brazen gear, wonder-working in 
magic feasts and in awakening a woman from 
seeming death, acclaimed in religious emotion 
by the thousands who besought his help, Em- 
pedocles taught men wineless rites that they 
might avert old age, and also to fast from 
evil. "An immortal god unto you, no longer 
a mortal, I go about honored by all, as is 
fitting, and crowned with fillets and fresh 
garlands." And because he led the over- 
throw of an aristocracy and refused the power 



BEGINNINGS OF PHILOSOPHY 161 

of king, lie was in the fifth century before 
Christ acclaimed, and in his native city of 
Agrigentum he is to this day worshiped, as 
an ideal champion of free institutions. 

This advocate of popular rights was also 
a mystic, teaching the existence of a psychic 
force, into which discord entering gave forth 
love and strife, an attractive and repulsive 
power, the solidarity and repulsion which we 
see working all about us. There is identity 
of elements, and one law pervades all nature. 
"They have no deep-thinking thoughts who 
think that what was not before comes into 
being, or that anything dies and perishes 
utterly." "Everything has the power of 
thought and a share in understanding. ' ' 
Such deductions as these from kinship with 
other orders of life led Empedocles to non- 
flesh-eating and other ascetic practices. 
"See ye not that ye devour one another in 
heedlessness of mind?" 

The mightiest and most majestic systems 
of thought are in progress as is a single 
human life — the goal of all knowledge, and 
of all theories of science, and of all specula- 
tion and wisdom, is only reached stumblingly, 
by gropings, by false doctrines critically con- 



162 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

sidered and improved and perhaps finally 
gaining the truth. While the warmth of the 
spirit of the Hellenes increased in individu- 
ality, their knowledge of a reason for the 
order that waxes not old, both of deathless 
nature and the soul of man, their knowledge 
of an ethical law was growing onward to 
clearness. Then too they said, as our scien- 
tists to-day have said, nature by its very 
uniformity teaches and guides to right action. 
They sought to find the law of the order and 
of the right. 



DEVELOPMENT OF LYRIC POETRY: NATIONAL 
GAMES OF THE HELLENES 

In spirit, as in outward form, the art which 
the Hellenes developed in this age of indi- 
vidualism must be the antithesis of the art of 
the heroic time foregone, the simple yet 
majestic lay. Diligently rounded hexameters 
of the old art, solemnly intoned by a rhapso- 
dist, seized upon and swayed the mind of 
listener into forgetfulness of self. Those 
older times were not unlike later days of 
European feudalism when the strength and 
possessions and even the lordship of the 



NEW IMPULSES IN POETRY 163 

baron lay in his conserving the old religious 
and political consciousness of the people; he 
nurtured minstrels who sang the days of the 
Nibelungen, or of Arthur 's knights and court. 

Homer's great epic gave no consciousness 
of the growth of the every-day man, no note 
of the every-day man's sorrow, joy, or tri- 
umph, no expression of that emotion at large 
among the people. Its soul was aristocratic. 
Neither in theme nor in art did it recognize 
the quickening of the Greek imagination to- 
ward democratic needs and equalities in life. 
It was what Dion Chrysostom leads Alexan- 
der to say centuries later; — "The poetry of 
Homer is the only poetry I see to be truly 
noble and splendid and regal, and fit for one 
who will some day rule men. ' ' It was a seda- 
tive. By its mere weight of the past, by the 
grandeur of its flowing stream and its perfect 
art, it hypnotized the Hellene who came to its 
recital with sentiments of revolt against the 
old order in his breast. 

Framed in the resplendent and dramatic 
setting of a court, or of a festival's recital, 
the fluent lays pushed to a dwindling distance 
the Greek's quickening towards his own time 
and emphasis of his own wants; they wiped 



164 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

memories of near-by griefs away, and lulled 
and soothed a mind overwrought with burdens 
at hand into a placidity which, in mirroring 
the poet's ideas, must lose consciousness of 
its own self-will. As the Hellene listened his 
sense of a social life approved by his fore- 
fathers, a life which the gods had loved even 
to walking and dwelling with men, his inter- 
est and pride in deeds of the Hellenic spirit, 
his sympathy and faith, would rise upper- 
most. 

The dignity and correctness of the moving 
story appealed to his race imagination. The 
broad and brilliant pictures it brought be- 
fore his eyes, grouped and word-painted and 
harmonized with unsurpassed taste, the hum- 
ming cadences of the dactyl, the beat of arsis 
and thesis suggesting steadiness and repose, 
held him apart from his time. They led him 
to forget himself, his seething discontents, 
his growing self-consciousness and urgent 
self-expression, the literalists who were lead- 
ing his rebellion. In its art and ritual the 
overawing, hypnotizing old epic order crushed 
the growing sentiment of the new man and his 
beginning of definite thinking. Its lien upon 
the evolving Greek was not unlike the reten- 



NEW IMPULSES IN POETRY 165 

tion the Hebrew scriptures, recited in their 
synagogues, made later upon the Jews — ex- 
cept that with the Hebrews the books were 
kept "holy," apart. It was not unlike what 
ecclesiastical ritual and hierarchrc display 
make upon democracy to-day. 

An over-bearing conservatism creates an 
artificial type of life, which can rarely ap- 
preciate its own artificiality. Greek epos had 
formalized, had put into permanence, the 
simple humanizing of nature by the people 
of its eld and the groupings of men in polity. 
The ardor of a long line of poets had formed 
a supreme art and through its medium an ob- 
jective religion. Poets had for generations 
elevated the race's taste. In the old reli- 
gious forms, even without a priest, the Hellene 
had come to have dogmatic utterance. No 
longer did the dogma satisfy. Its utterance 
became more and more mediocre. Poets re- 
fused to smother emotion in the old-time 
heroics. In art the new impulses of the Hel- 
lenic spirit must breathe. Poetry that re- 
flected the feeling of the day, the emotion of 
their world, was coming to recognition and 
within the life of the people, and in its on- 
ward surging was evolving new forms for its 



166 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

expression. Now that old political forces 
were disappearing and the individual was 
substituted for the group, each individual life 
was acquiring fresh impulse and spontaneous 
movement, and there was growing individual 
obligation. And, as we have seen, the new 
order brought belief of the possibility of in- 
dividual inspiration in religion itself. 

Urged on by the changes and vicissitudes 
of the commonweal in its attempted conquest 
of the present, urged by the bolder spirits 
and the tenets of his new religion, the less 
radical Hellene was learning that he too, his 
lot, his hopes, his fears, were accountable 
units. He was beginning the frankest liberty 
of speech when circumstances moved his 
mind. His unreserved personal experiences 
met sympathy. His sentiments interested his 
fellows whether he spoke of the pleasure he 
enjoyed, or the injustice and ills he suffered. 
Songs were now picturing the people, what 
they felt, what they thought. Hymns of 
thanksgiving, hymeneals, funeral dirges and 
rustic carols of simplest form had been 
chanted in Greece from time without record. 
Now they were essaying to interpret the con- 
tent of the people's vision more completely, 



EVOLUTION OF THE LYRIC 167 

their world, their labor and their love. Po- 
etry was becoming popular in another sense. 
Before it had been popular in the meaning 
that it was beloved by the people and voiced 
their race sentiment. Now through the evo- 
lution of lyrics it was becoming popular in the 
sense that it told individual sentiment and 
life. The epos was monumental. A folk is 
not known, however, by the mighty monu- 
ments of its spirit alone. Its art is found also 
in minuter and universal products cut by the 
folk hand and loved by and expressing the 
folk heart. 

An intense community life, ardent loyalty 
to the evolving state, now led the inspired 
singer to political and warlike hymns. His 
state, that is his city and its adjoining terri- 
tory, was foremost in the mind of every 
Greek. It was to him a union which called 
into being and brought to practice the best 
powers of even the flimsiest characters. In 
the painful struggles of the new time the 
elegy was born, in meter almost twin-sister 
of the epos. The epic's swing and stateli- 
ness lay in the elegy's first verse. By reduc- 
ing the second line to five feet the singer 
made the surge of the thought turn about 



168 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

■upon itself, thus breaking the impulse and 
giving a pause and suggesting reflection — all 
fair signs of need in the new individualism. 
The reflection the verse suggested also intro- 
duced a skepticism which was allied to a dis- 
integration of the old religious order. De- 
parture from the established hexameter 
meant that centuries of the lyric age would 
soon be speeding. 

The couplet of the elegy fluted, for the 
word it is claimed first meant a reed flute. 
Its clear and individual note gave voice to in- 
terests as varied and broad as prose, then 
undeveloped, might have done. Bravery and 
devotion to the state breathed in the war- 
campaign verse of Tyrtaeus, earliest of the 
Ionian elegists, so-called the lame school- 
master from Athens, who sang for the Spar- 
tans with Doric religiosity and veneration 
for the past, the most famous of his elegies, 
"Good and Lawful Order." His marching 
songs, which were not elegies, expressed the 
primal instinct of the people for whom he 
sang, and their feeling of race, of military 
domination, and, sounding a patriotic clarion 
to sinking hearts, incited the Spartans by 
bold advance to regain their old-time lands. 



EVOLUTION OF THE LYRIC 169 

Spartan soldiery when campaigning, after the 
evening meal and their singing in popular 
chorus a paean to the gods, vied with one 
another for a repetition best befitting the 
force and beauty of these military chants. 
This may have been between the years 645 
and 628 before Christ. 

Eeflections upon the condition of life, its 
politics, its philosophy, appear in the vigor- 
ous elegies of Solon which mirror his noble 
life, and in the sententious maxims, replete 
with human spirit, of other elegists. These, 
called gnomic because of their detachable 
sentences reflecting on moral ideas, had en- 
during force through generations of Hellenes. 
In later centuries, in the Greek youths' edu- 
cation they stood side by side with the sem- 
inal poems of Homer and Hesiod in inbreed- 
ing seeds of virtue and the conduct of life. 
"From the noble you will learn what is noble ; 
if you mix with the base, you will lose what 
wits you have," wrote Theognis, who taught 
piety, respect and the moderation of the old 
reverent fear, aidos. Through these centu- 
ries the later moral tradition of the race was 
slowly formed, embodied in verse and handed 
down from generation to generation — a form 



170 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

of growth of all civilized society. In the old 
Greek education such ethical precepts, born 
of the reflective spirit, of the elegy, were of 
inestimable value. 

The elegy expressed also, possibly from 
poets affected by contact with the oriental 
luxury of the Lydians but intellectually of 
Greek impress, the light jest and mediocrities 
of after-dinner clubs, the fleeting joys of 
youth and hatred of old age, when recital in 
lighter manner than the epic filled the hour. 
Singing at banquets was a race-old custom, 
the banquet itself was of a religious character, 
and the elegy may have served as a kind of 
grace. But its reflective break determined 
the verse more especially for proverb and 
ultimately for sadness and lament. 

During these changing generations, when 
appreciation of the new had not fully realized 
itself, that is, in the passage from the old 
epic simplicity to subtler conditions, the 
elegy sang profoundly the cry of the Greek 
spirit at the instability and uncertainty of 
human affairs. • ' Small is . the strength of 
man," lamented Simonides, a later poet, "un- 
conquerable his sorrows. Through his brief 
life grief treads on grief, and death hangs 



EVOLUTION OF THE LYRIC 171 

over him at last." And with true Dorian in- 
stinct decrying the degrading effects of 
money, — believing with the Greeks at large 
wealth a good and desirable thing, but with 
property must go education, a regard for its 
use in a wise effective to all — an elegy of 
Theognis sings, "We use care in choosing the 
best race of horses, but a noble man marries 
a mean-born woman straightway, if she 
brings with her money, and a woman does not 
reject a man if he is rich." Thus the elegy 
came to be one articulation, one outgrowth, in 
the Hellene's divinely energic genius for ex- 
pressing the varying moods of the human 
soul. 

Self-reliance in the affairs of life and of 
state grew apace. Activity in all the Greek's 
interests increased. His metrical way had 
already come to the independent iambic, the 
darting, shooting meter of raillery and in- 
vective, mythed as the invention of the maid 
Iambe when she would draw a smile from the 
sad-hearted mother of Persephone, and de- 
veloped in the feasts of Demeter at Eleusis 
on days licensed for keen and unrestrained 
jocosity. 

Here again we have the differentiating, 



172 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

that adaptation of form to substance, that 
harmony rooted in the Greek temperament, 
in which the vigorous, creative taste of the 
Hellene invariably showed itself. Each new 
out-springing of their genius was. profound 
and rational. It was also ethical and aes- 
thetic. Behind it some race need, some dis- 
tinct cause, had vitalized it into form and 
distinguished it from its brothers. And each 
separate expression in his literature, each spe- 
cial substance of thought and feeling having 
crystallized its technical form, never outgrew 
artistic and well-defined limits. The swift 
beat of the iambic, impetuosity, strength and 
pungency, marked it for sallies of ridicule 
and scorn. It was fitted for recitative. 

The poet whose hate-poisoned passion and 
unbridled invective seized the lilt for festival- 
day rites and used it with consummate art, 
was Archilochus, who is said to have written 
so early as the year 688 before Christ. Con- 
temporaries of his, and the after world of 
Hellas, marveled at his fierce personal sa- 
tire and exuberant caricature. He united the 
new genius of democracy from his mother, a 
slave woman, to the old in his father, an 
Ionian noble, and thus seems to have been 



EVOLUTION OF THE LYRIC 173 

an essential need of his time. His forceful 
and original spirit marks the complete break 
with the old traditions of poetry. He proved, 
even by foul-mouthed charges against the girl 
he had wanted to marry and her fa s mily, that 
now there was a popular sentiment in the re- 
laxation of Ionian life to which the singer 
could appeal. When he wrote of throwing 
away his shield in battle and fleeing for 
safety, he showed there were people who 
would justify his deed. In the brisk retort 
of iambics, also, Solon of Athens defended his 
failing statesmanship. 

Elegiac and iambic reached toward the pure 
lyric. Lyric expression is more impetuous, 
more profound — quite apart from its music 
and the poise of its dance. Lyric inspiration, 
we should note, and the so-called lyric mad- 
ness, were of the ecstasy of the spreading 
Orphism, at one with the divine enthusiasm of 
Dionysus. Indeed the Bacchic hymn in its 
early time expressed the Hellene's amaze and 
worship, his pious joy in stimulating gener- 
ative processes and glorifying the god in the 
springing of the year, his thanksgiving and 
his lament at the divinity's mysterious decay 
after the reaping. 



174 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

The spirit of the Hellene could not have 
become independent in its lyric expression, 
could not have stood by its own strength, 
without the development of writing and the 
diffusion of the art. Communication no 
longer depended almost wholly on word of 
mouth transmission. By bringing in the 
papyrus that grew in the shallows of Egyp- 
tian waters, Greek trade supplied a ready ma- 
terial to poetry's support. This aid began 
about the year 660 before Christ. Upon the 
papyrus' slender slips a form of poetry, short 
and easily handed about, might circulate, 
might enter the intimacies of life and par- 
take of their spirit. Enjoyment of the lyric, 
then, would depend no longer on the chanter 's 
word of mouth. Solitary reading would be- 
come possible and its sequent independent 
reflection. Knowledge would increase. The 
scenic epic recital of the rhapsodist would be 
still more infrequent — even if, in the growth 
of democracy, courts for its pageantry were 
becoming fewer. 

In a manner, but, we must remember, 
under far different social conditions, just as 
we moderns through the evolution of mov- 
able type developed the novel to universalize 



EVOLUTION OF THE LYRIC 175 

and formalize current phases of life in place 
of the drama which, when the imagination of 
man was freed, burst on the world in the 
days of Elizabeth, so in those old Greek cen- 
turies, through the coming in of the Egyptian 
writing-slips, the Hellene might take to him- 
self a secluded and individual entertainment. 
Like our novel the lyric was an abettor of 
democracy. Indeed, from its flexibility and 
inclusiveness, one might say that it had also 
kinship with that most catholic servant of 
the written word, journalism. In ruder sur- 
roundings than a noble's court, with the 
simple comradeship of simple friends, or in 
choral worship of some god, or in solitude, 
the Hellene might now enjoy his day's com- 
positions — verses on delicate papyrus tell- 
ing of his fellows ' sentiments and interests. 
Still the lyric was memorized also. 

And poetry to those old Hellenes was not 
an affair of the closet, an enjoyment to con- 
fess with a blush, as with us to-day. Nor 
were they so distraught by diversity and 
multiplicity that they had not intension of 
mind to listen and enjoy. The art in multiple 
forms was one expression of their energy, 
and a significant voice of their race. It en- 



176 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

tered their life just as the beauty of nature 
entered. It was original in the instinct and 
natural gift of the people. It was largely 
and intimately theirs. It was their educa- 
tion and a part of their religion. Through 
his inspiration the poet stood apart and had 
a closer communion with divine powers than 
other men. Poetry was a possession of every 
Hellene, and had been from those times 
whose mists conceal their early morning, 
when doubtless, minstrel or rhapsodist was a 
scripless tramp. It was continued in the 
long cultivation of the epos. When the, 
muse turned to the people and sang in forms 
of the melos, it was not wholly to please but 
to induct to facts of life, to teach in agree- 
able way the action and feeling and charac- 
ter of men and women, to give a body to phi- 
losophy. The poet sang so racial and so hu- 
man a song, whether for marching soldiers, 
their victory in battles, their patriotic fervor, 
or a hymn to a god, a dirge, a wedding-joy 
or other convivial meeting, that he might 
celebrate heroes and their commensal gods, 
or so simple a social member as a grinder 
of corn or an itinerant vine-trimmer and his 
fellow-wayfaring swallow of the spring. 



EVOLUTION OF THE LYRIC 177 

The flowering of Greek lyric poetry into 
perfect self-expression followed, by old-time 
legend, the stringing of the lyre of four, 
strings, which had served for the chanting of 
the epic lay, to the compass of an octave. 
This evolution is ascribed to the hand of 
Terpander of Lesbos and the year 669 be- 
fore Christ. Terpander not only expanded 
the lyre, his work incited others to improve 
the shrill flute, and he also composed music 
for the religious chant called a nome. ' ' Zeus, 
first cause of all, leader of all; Zeus, to 
thee I send this beginning of hymns,' ' is as- 
cribed to him as the beginning of such a 
lyric. Music with the Greeks was simple, and 
used to " sweeten,' ' as they said, the words. 

The outbranching of music evidences the 
growth of reflective brooding in the Greek 
spirit. 

Verses breathing individual emotion will 
not suffer the metes and bounds of inva- 
riability. Impassioned poetry falls into 
rhythm, metrical form. It hastens; it rests 
in the irregular and capricious movement we 
call tempo rubato. It sings itself; that is, it 
demands a voice, a singer. Thus it unites 
with the music of the lyre. Moreover, the 



178 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

singer sympathizing with the song's meter 
can not help his body's falling into animated 
gesture and beating responsive to the meas- 
ure. He would aid language in the ex- 
pression of thought. So dance took men's 
form from e very-day walk or slouch to regu- 
lated and studied movement. Thus elabo- 
rated, mimetic singing and dancing, which 
enlist and train ear and voice and eye and 
foot, grow from the poem of emotion. For 
the interweaving and exchange of the dance 
there was to the Hellene religious exaltation 
— their demiurgus, Eros, in the primeval 
motion of the choric passages of stars and 
constellations had set their great prototype. 9 
Of the theme and emotion of Greek lyrics 
the more elastic and individual belonged to 
the iEolians. But in Lesbos, home of iEoli- 
ans, the lyric genius of perfect monodic song 
appeared and dured only so long in that 
Greek day as the sunlit sparkle and strong 
discharge of a shower lasts in summer. A 
surpassing natural beauty crowned their is- 

9 In other religions than the Greek, dances had, and 
still have no small part. Christian churches were once 
built to accommodate dancing, of which, it is claimed, 
bishops were leaders. 



EVOLUTION OF THE LYRIC 179 

land. Vine and slirub and tree of hill and 
vale, bright bine skies, and warm, circumam- 
bient seas nrged the spirit's intensity and 
passion. Vehemence and concentration of 
feeling characterized its folk, especially its 
oligarchy. They were sensuous, rich from 
a maritime commerce, luxnry-loving from 
Asiatic influence — here in these times of Les- 
bos must have been an early conflict between 
oriental and Greek ideas. Perhaps they 
were familiar with the fancies and abandon 
of Lydian and Phrygian song and mode. 
They were generously filled with Greek ardor 
for beauty. Men and women alike were edu- 
cated and free. 

Such conditions, their land hemmed in, 
their evolution not expressing itself in the in- 
terests of their larger group, the Ionians, 
political unrest and an irresponsible tyran- 
nus throwing the human soul back upon it- 
self and penning its impulses — all conditions 
filled their art and their atmosphere with a 
special electric force. In brilliant summer 
skies lightnings sometimes leap from cloud 
of light to cloud of light. So passionate lyric 
outburst charged with its genius the human 
spirit of the island. A new message fulgur- 



180 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

ated from the soul of its children — its de- 
livery intense and extreme from the singer's 
bursting of old bonds and the drenching of 
the island with beauty. 

In Lesbos the individual found supreme ex- 
pression; harmonies of sound and form 
exquisite blending. Sappho's "utterance 
mingled with fire/' her lucidity and simple 
melody, her sensibility to the loveliness of 
nature, her flame-like emotion, declare that 
man had reached his full stature of love. No 
writer ever wrote down so magically the in- 
most feeling of the human heart, never so 
mysteriously crystallized that fire of the soul 
in human speech. 10 

10 Near the middle of our last century Swinburne 
wrote of her in her own Sapphic meter: 
Ah the singing, ah the delight, the passion ! 
All the Loves wept, listening; sick with anguish, 
Stood the crowned nine Muses about Apollo; 

Fear was upon them, 

While the tenth sang wonderful things they knew not. 
Ah the tenth, the Lesbian! the nine were silent, 
None endured the sound of her song for weeping; 
Laurel by laurel, 

Faded all their crowns; but about her forehead, 
Round her woven tresses and ashen temples 



EVOLUTION OF THE LYRIC 181 

Sappho's translucent verse has never 
palled upon the taste of any succeeding cen- 
tury, although in succeeding centuries a 
monkish zeal, distorting in short and narrow 
vision the meaning of an exquisite product, 
may have destroyed it in part. Certain in 
Greece, and later, have blackened the name 
of this great genius — certain whose prejudice 
heats and smolders at a woman's overstep- 
ping the reticence prescribed by social con- 
vention, others who merely pruriently scan- 
dalmonger and ail for a name as target for 
buffooning wit. Sappho was a gentlewoman 
of Mytilene, married and blessed with a 
daughter. She received into her house girls 
to instruct in music and poetry. The best 
learning of to-day makes clear her true char- 
acter, and is inclined to echo the awe-struck 
sentence of Strabo, " Sappho is something 
marvelous ( dao^aavov re xprjfxa ) ; in all his- 
tory you find no woman to compare with her 
in any degree." 

Man's full stature of pride burns in odes 
of Alcseus — the fiery, high-spirited, restless 

White as dead snow, paler than grass in summer, 

Ravaged with kisses, 
Shone a light of fire as a crown forever. 



182 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

tory, hating popular government, rating high 
his order, resolute even in exile, and finally 
coming back to Lesbos to accept the clem- 
ency of Pittacus whom he had vituperated 
and whom the people had, in despair at civil 
discord and seeking relief, made tyrannus. 

A place was sanctified the Greeks thought 
when once visited by the shaft of Zeus. But 
the shaft, lightning, sterilizes where it 
strikes. Sterility abode in Lesbos. Poetic 
brilliance burned to final corruption. Not 
again did the .ZEolians give greatly to the 
spirit of Hellas until in the decline of Greek 
art and Greek polity. 

.iEolian songs were made for a single voice 
to chant to a flute — to listen to for personal 
pleasure, to bring grace and charm to the 
feast: Dorian songs for choruses rhyth- 
mically dancing as they chanted. Dorian 
mode and melody, said Aristotle, are ethical ; 
"Dorian music is the gravest and manliest.' ' 
Objectivity strongly affected it. This may 
have come because the Dorians, those aristo- 
crats of war, in their sternness and severity 
of the military camp, conscious perhaps that 
their rigidity and decorum frustrated the 
working of the muse through the individual 



EVOLUTION OF THE LYRIC 183 

artist, and also possibly having a subtle sense 
that art of the first order unfolds only in 
long-established and less politically weighted 
civilizations, rather patronized than them- 
selves composed or wrote verse. They had 
resort to the Ionians to interpret themselves 
to themselves. 

During those earlier generations gifted 
singers from the old home of song came 
among the haughty Dorians, and in their 
sweet, broad, rustic speech, and uttering their 
tribal simplicity and strength sang for them, 
and for pay, the notes of the new time — 
singers who should add glory to their solem- 
nities and in soaring sweep celebrate their 
Dorian government, the splendor of Apollo 
and other gods the Dorians tribally wor- 
shiped, and the glorious deeds of their 
heroes. Alcman, so-called a slave from 
Lydian Sardis, was among the singers. At 
Sparta, then a renowned city of Hellas, he 
found a religious people celebrating festivals 
to Apollo, to Artemis. Also he found men 
and women taught in gymnastics and music. 
Maidens he delighted in training in harmony 
of voice and motion. The new growth music 
had lately made he joined with the choric 



184 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

dance and called upon himself to ' ' sing to the 
yonng girls a melodious song in the new 
fashion." A fragment from one of his 
graceful parthenia touchingly refers to the 
old age that now kept him from his wonted 
drill:— 

No longer, maids of honey voice and yearning tones, 
Can my limbs bear me. that I were the cerylus! 
Who skims o'er blossoms of the wave together on the 

wing 
With kingfishers, a dauntless heart, sea-purple bird of 

spring. 11 

11 A second fragment of the genius of Alcman is one 
of the evidences, to which we have referred on pages 
56 and 77 foregoing, of the appeal to the Hellenes of 
night and its mysterious solemnity. The fragment tells 
in exquisite completeness how the sleep of nature roused 
the Hellene's sentiment. 

Alcman may have composed his verse as he stood 
under midnight stars in the vale of Lacedsemon, his 
imagination passing from the peaks of neighboring 
Taygetus, down through the peopled forests of the 
mountain sides to the Mediterranean which washes the 
base: 
The range's peaks, and their gullied sides, lie wrapt in 

sleep ; 
The jutting headlands and swoln mountain torrents; 
Things that creep, all whatsoever the black earth doth 

nourish ; 
Beasts that haunt the heights; the swarms of bees; 



EVOLUTION OF THE LYRIC 185 

A cadence of harmonized voices united 
with the stately and semi-dramatic dance, 
was an essential to the chorus. Such solemn 
and rhythmic mnsic was at one with the 
race's prepossessions. It held together the 
spirit of the people in their all^important re- 
lation to the state, and it kept their health. 
It kindled the gods to kindness. Its very 
being and practice were virtuous recognition 
of the gods' powers. 

The Greeks, now congregated in cities, 
would preserve the old epic religious unity, 
Knowing the impossibility for the poor or 
average citizen to give festivals, to have a 
sanctuary, to sacrifice to the gods, they 
shared such religious ritual in common. De- 
light in a common possession led tribe, guild, 
trades-union, club and even cities to support 
choruses. Men and women of a community, 
picked singers and dancers, clad in canonical 
robes and crowned with the velvet-leafed 
daphne or other green garland, singing hymns 

Flocks of swift-winged birds; 

And in the deeps of the purple sea huge monsters; 

— All wrapt in sleep. 

Doubtless the Greek poet's lines suggested our mod- 
ern Goethe's "Ueber alien Gipf eln ist Run.' " 



186 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

to the flute's accompaniment, wound march- 
ing through their pellucid air — such a pro- 
cession the Parthenon's graceful frieze has 
saved to us. They danced themes, subjects, 
somewhat as our modern ballet, but then in 
statelier liturgy of church and city. The end 
of their pilgrimage was the shrine of some 
god whom the singers sought to glorify by 
strophe and antistrophe of choric song and 
the solemn rhythmic paces of choric dance. 

In this lyric activity every city had its com- 
poser, the chorodidascalus, who trained the 
chorus. Contests for excellence were com- 
mon, and certain families handed down the 
art, as craftsmen handed their artistry, from 
father to son. Many types of songs resulted 
from this race-interest and race-hymn, such 
as the grave and graceful paean to Apollo 
danced in parallel files. Also the dithyramb 
to Dionysus often tumultuously circling, mi- 
metic of the mysterious god of inebriety at 
the vintage festivals. To all festivals, said 
Plato, "the gods pitying the race of mortals 
born for sorrow and toil gave the Muses, and 
Apollo, and Dionysus for comrades." But 
whatever the nature of the song, whether of 
sumptuous revelry, of pure nobility, or of 



EVOLUTION OF THE LYRIC 187 

mere elegance, the race's aesthetic instinct 
ever fitted form and spirit, and developed a 
complete art product. 

Evolution of the Greek lyric continued 
when Stesichorus of Sicily whose very name 
"marshal of the chorus" tells" his life, secu- 
larized the choral lyric and with an almost 
epic weight sang of heroes. Then also the 
distinguished genius of Simonides of Ceos 
composed encomia in more human, more 
graceful and less intense way upon winners 
of Olympian victories, and upon others illus- 
trious for their deed or public life. His ex- 
quisitely simple and solemn threnody on 
Leonidas and his band dead at Thermopylae 
bears out his mellow, human note, and other 
monumental epigrams show the perfection 
with which an Ionian expressed Dorian feel- 
ing and for the first time, or if we count 
Homer's Iliad, for the second time, uttered 
the pan-Hellenic victory over the barbarian. 
Simonides was the first pan-Hellenic lyricist. 

Strophe and antistrophe of the choral 
lyric, and the rhythmic movement of the 
choric dance, celebrated also some victor of 
the Hellenic games at the singing of Pindar. 
For such winning "the Theban eagle' ' wound 



188 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

his song through many a labyrinthine myth. 
" Let us not think," said he, "to praise a 
place of festival more glorious than Olym- 
piad 

Olympic games had their origin, . perhaps, 
in a religious rite, and a seasonal rite pro- 
motive of fertility, to the great goddess of 
the early .ZEgean peoples; with Achaean in- 
fluence transferring their honors to Zeus, 
and finally circling the tomb of the tradi- 
tional Pelops for whom Hercules, son of 
Zeus, "having fenced about the Altis," said 
Pindar, "marked off the bounds of it 
Therein he set apart the spoils of war for an 
offering, and made sacrifices and instituted 
the fifth year feast." The contest, it is 
claimed, originally determined the victor of a 
band of young men. He should embody the 
vigorous spirit and fortune of the folk for 
the new year coming and drive out the old 
spent year. 

The highway to Olympia the Hellenes es- 
teemed a via sacra, and violation of the terri- 
tory in which the games were held, a sin 
against the majesty of Zeus. From the 
slopes neighboring the stadium, forty thou- 
sand onlookers, it has been computed, might 



PAN-HELLENIC GAMES: THEIR STIMULUS 189 

have watched contestants, who, as they en- 
tered the stadium, had met in the altar to the 
athlete god, vital, momentous opportunity, 
"the chance central of circumstance, ' ' xacpoc;, 
promptings triumphantly to energise the de- 
cisive moment of action, to bring to one su- 
preme effort all forces of body and will. 

The contest fell at the full of the moon in 
August or September, in the riant atmos- 
phere, on the fat plains, and amid the olive 
groves of Elis. After their full evolution 
during these centuries of the Hellenes ' 
growth, the Greek world esteemed a victory, 
when, sang Pindar, "all the warrior company 
thundered great applause," beyond all 
other possessions. A wreath of leaves cut 
with a golden sickle from "the wild olive 
of the beautiful crown, ' ' and given within the 
temple of Zeus, 12 a branch of palm, a canoniz- 
ing in the Altis were the prize of the victor. 
There was also a soul-animating celebration 
of himself in choral chants of triumph and 
prayer and libation to the god. Poets of ex- 

12 Perhaps in later years the olive crown was given 
before the Pheidian gold and ivory statue of Zeus, the 
sublimity of which antiquity extolled as the highest 
creation of art, 



190 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

alted muse sang his achievement and dwelt 
upon his reincarnating the virtues and 
prowess of old heroes. Triumphant choric 
chanting of the encomiastic ode at his home- 
coming followed, and was perhaps the vic- 
tor's chief est glory, for he had seemingly 
brought undying fame and honor to his 
city. 

Other games, the Pythian, honoring Phoe- 
bus Apollo, god of the golden lyre as well 
as golden bow, spiritualized beyond the phys- 
ical rigor of the Olympic by their musical 
contests, that is, by singing to the accom- 
paniment of flute and cithara, or independent 
playing of the cithara or flute. At the ' ' seat 
of the voice of God, ' ' Delphi, the Greeks cele- 
brated these fine arts once in eight years, 
and long before they added gymnic struggles 
and the chariot race. A chaplet of bay 
leaves picked in the Vale of Tempe was the 
prize. The Isthmian games in honor of 
Poseidon at Corinth may have had a regatta 
in addition to musical competition and ath- 
letics. Their award was a wreath of dried 
celery or pine leaves. The game to Nemean 
Zeus, in the cypress grove of Nemea, like the 
Isthmian held in the second and fourth year 



PAN-HELLENIC GAMES: THEIR STIMULUS 191 

of each Olympiad, had for its victor a crown 
of fresh celery. 13 

Such national, pan-Hellenic games, a form 
we must remember of the Greeks' humaniz- 
ing religion, a witness of the spiritual unity 
of the body-social, evolved especially during 
these agitated centuries of Greek life, and 
were in the height of their development in the 
glorious days immediately to follow. They 
united the old Hellenic naturalism, physical 
fitness — a necessity to their life in their fre- 
quent wars— to the idea of the new, closely 
knit life and state, that the gods delighted 
in the spectacle of well-balanced, vigorous 
bodies developed in the perfection of health 
and strength. The vitality of Greek athletic 
festivals lay in this. Virtue and beauty to 
the Greeks, early and late were the same 
flower of human life. " There can be no 
fairer sight," wrote Plato, "than that of a 
man who unites moral beauty in his soul with 

13 "Heavens ! Mardonius, against what sort of men have 
you led us to fight, men who make games not for the 
sake of money, but for honor!" the pusillanimous 
Xerxes is reported by Herodotus to have said to a chief 
instigator of his expedition, one day between the Per- 
sian army's action at Thermopylae and the disaster at 
Salamis. 



192 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

an outward beauty of form, the body corre- 
sponding and harmonizing with the soul be- 
cause the same great pattern is in both." 
And Socrates hoped that for Charmides, a 
youth of beautiful figure, a certain some- 
thing was not lacking — "a soul as well de- 
veloped as his body." 

The national game and race worship 
fraught with rites of joy and gladness 
focused consciousness growing in art and 
state, and served as a check to forces decen- 
tralizing Greek life. They had a strength 
and an importance we can not with our times ' 
outlook readily conceive. Unlike modern na- 
tional and international athletics they were 
neither "professional," fads for the inept or 
rudimentary brain nor for the unco rich, nor 
booms for money-mad speculators. They 
were rooted, while the Hellene preserved his 
Hellenism, in race evolution, in ancestral re- 
ligion, in his character-loving autonomy and 
its equilibrium. In the days of free Hellas 
their spirit was fundamental and sound. 

Meeting places of the great games, es- 
pecially Olympia and Delphi, grew to be 
museums of art, holy cities, treasure-stores 
of splendid statues, marble and gold and 



PAN-HELLENIC GAMES: THEIR STIMULUS 193 

ivory, and of temples of the gods, deposi- 
tories of the race's history and of human 
knowledge. 

Within the sacred confines of the games 
quick-witted Greek met nimble-witted Greek. 
Whether he went as a private citizen or one 
of an official embassy representing some 
western city in Greek Sicily or a community 
of Hellenes in Asia, he went not as a sight- 
seer merely, nor even as a revisitor to an an- 
cient home of his race, but as a pilgrim pene- 
trated with reverence for his race 's legends of 
Zeus, with religious awe of the Far-Darter, 
with devotion to Hercules of the Unconquer- 
able Hands. He came to know other opinions 
than his own locality's, his tribe's, and to 
realize anew the unity of his race. Friction 
with his kind kindled afresh fires of common 
brotherhood. He exchanged with another 
usage and ways. He gathered ideas for later 
thought. 

It is not possible to sketch what his vivid 
and intellectual life won from these meeting 
centers for his race. On his way to the 
games, and homeward again, he companioned 
hardy Greek seamen and traders as their 
swift, black ship cut the waters of the Mid- 



194 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

land Sea toward Olympia or Delphi, or Cor- 
inth. He fell in association not only with 
brother Hellene, but with foreign folk. Cun- 
ning Asiatic vendors, and, doubtless, ad- 
venturous Egyptians, he traveled cheek by 
jowl with and met in public houses where he 
sought rest and cheer. At selling booth he 
saw foreign handiwork. The stimulus his 
sane and sympathetic travel brought the 
Greek — the Hellene never laying aside his 
race-consciousness and race-legend — the gain 
by fraternizing with another from an op- 
posite quarter, some remote city of the Greek 
world, or from another race, were of unac- 
countable importance. 

Thus the games developed the Greeks' gen- 
eral knowledge and conserved their religious 
and political tradition. They stimulated the 
poet in preparing an aroused and sympa- 
thetic audience for his ode. They impelled 
the architect and sculptor to perfecting 
statue and pillar and altar and temple. 
They incited the craftsman of golden ewers, 
censers, chariots. They urged the breeding 
of horses. On all sides they promoted sense 
of beauty and art. In the opportunity they 
gave rich men to pay for the equipping of 



PAN-HELLENIC GAMES: THEIR STIMULUS 195 

legations and training of choruses, they 
opened the purse of those possibly without 
any other merit for civic distinction, and 
warmed the occasion to their praise. By no 
way could wealth gain influence and popular- 
ity among the Hellenes so genuinely as 
by augmenting their national festivals and 
training chorus and actors for religious rites. 
The odes which the glory of these national 
games inspired in the singer were not merely 
setting out the victory of the citizen. The 
splendor of the contest and the far-reaching 
renown of the winner stimulated the poet to 
review the religious cult, to retell old race 
myths, to retrace their political bearing, and 
to show them in a new brilliance. He might 
parallel the living victor with an old race 
hero, might trace likeness between the doer 
of far-ofr" days and the competitor of that 
present day and thus idealize the living man. 
Pindar's odes of victory which the Greeks 
esteemed the best form of their national 
song, are the still sonorous voices of those 
pulsing centers of Hellenic life, the national 
games. The odes tell the religious awe of 
the poet to which the choric singers and 
dancers gave interpretation. 



196 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

The Doric choral seems to have been the 
organ note of the old Hellenes. Apart from 
its association with our religious rites our 
modern organ has a generic quality, imper- 
sonality, a voicing in its pulsing notes of 
united souls rather than the aspiration or, 
desolation or joy of a single being. Its rotund 
sonority and massive harmonies ; its reflective 
expression of joy, its seriousness, its gravity, 
its aching melancholy, its triumphant energy 
and victory and religious peace, may pos- 
sibly utter the human soul for us of to-day 
as the choral of the Dorian genius voiced 
emotions of the Hellenes. 

Greek lyric poetry was no less a great ex- 
pression of the genius of the Greek people 
than the epic, we have said. In this age of 
evolving individualism in which we have 
glimpsed the lyric's evolution, the poet, as in 
the epic age, was priest and prophet to his 
people, a giver of religious and ethical 
maxims. With the gnomic poet this holds 
true, and also with those later. "The hopes 
of men are tossed up and down. Let a man 
remember that his raiment is worn on mortal 
limbs, ' ' wrote the majestic Pindar. ' * Things 
of a day! What are we! What are we not ? 



PAN-HELLENIC GAMES: THEIR STIMULUS 197 

Man is a shadow and a dream. ' ' The imagi- 
native force and sustained utterance of this 
great lyricist emphasized Doric religious 
consciousness and Orphic teachings. Pindar 
alone of the lyric poets seems to have sung 
that the soul is immortal, divine, and finally 
through purgation receives endless felicity. 

The lyric was at its height when Sparta, 
preeminently the city of choric singing was 
leader in Greece. When the choral song was 
transplanted to Athens varying religious con- 
ceptions and a different tribal and social 
life diminished its popularity. Among the 
Dorians centuries of athletic drill and mil- 
itary tactics had given them delight in 
rhythmic movement. "Women, we have seen 
in Alcman's verse, as well as men were 
trained in the art. At Athens, although girls 
hymned to Pallas as they marched through 
the roadway and climbed the marble stairs of 
the Acropolis, yet they were more cut off 
from free and active life, and their grace 
and charm could not inspire such poetic ardor 
as Alcman's at Sparta. Then also at Athens 
the choral hymn to Dionysus was ripening 
into the drama. 

Older forms of Greek music were stately 



198 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

and simple. The poet composed his own 
music, which reflected his art, and he trained 
the chorus sympathetically to sing and dance 
his composition. He was the mouthpiece of 
ethical and racial feeling. But later than 
this time, as generations passed, the early 
choral sublimity, its pure melody united with 
definite ethical thought became too difficult 
for disciples of the new education. Degener- 
ation in imagination led to florid and affected 
and flaccid styles. Music gained supremacy 
over words, and the lyricist became a verse- 
writer who took orders for his composition 
from the musician. Earlier lyrics were con- 
temned. Neglected, they were forgotten. 
Pride of race and of family would save such 
poems as Pindar's victory odes. Others 
would be subject to the caprice of minstrels 
and only preserved for some passages of 
special appeal. Lyric composition from its 
nature abides less easily in the memory than 
epic lays. With the loss or abandonment of 
ethical character and simplicity in the music 
went disregard for the verse. And thus the 
world lost noble poems. 

Modes of fashion in music never change, 
said Plato, without the greatest laws of the 



PAN-HELLENIC GAMES: THEIR STIMULUS 199 

state changing. The later divisions of Hellas 
affected the Hellenes' national festivals. As- 
semblies degenerated. Great odes of victory 
died out. And finally the elegiac current of 
time, flowing through the stretches of plain, 
or barren sand, or dark forest of later cen- 
turies, brought down few petals of the 
splendid roses of Lesbos that Sappho sang, 
and only broken stems of the barbed nettles 
of Archilochus — these and a few other re- 
mains ; and these mainly because teachers of 
rhetoric for ends of illustration encased ex- 
cerpts in treatises — writings whose dry im- 
perviousness to flood and color neutral to re- 
ligious zeal saved the genuine utterance of 
the human spirit embedded in them. 



FIFTY YEARS OF DISTIN- 
GUISHED WORKS 



Progress is, in fact, the same thing as the continued 
production of new ideas, and we can only discover the 
law of this production by examining sequences of ideas 
when they are frequent and of considerable length. — 
Sir Henry James Sumner Maine, in Early History 
of Institutions. 

Whatever be the nature and value of that bundle of 
influences which we call Progress, nothing can be more 
certain than that, when a society is once touched by it, 
it spreads like a contagion. Yet, so far as our knowl- 
edge extends, there was only one society in which it 
was endemic. ... To on© small people ... it was 
given to create the principle of Progress. . . . That 
people was the Greek. Except the blind forces of 
Nature, nothing moves in this world which is not Greek 
in its origin. A ferment spreading from that source 
has vitalized all the great progressive races of mankind. 
— Sir Henry James Sumner Maine, in The Effects 
of Observation of India on Modern European Thought. 

Dear city of men without master or lord, 
Fair fortress and fostress of sons born free, 
"Who stand in her sight and in thine, sun, 
Slaves of no man, subjects of none; 
A wonder enthroned on the hills and sea, 
A maiden crowned with a fourfold glory 
That none from the pride of her head may rend, 
Violet and olive-leaf purple and hoary, 
Song-wreath and story the fairest of fame, 
Flowers that the winter can blast not or bend; 
A light upon earth as the sun's own flame, 
A name as his name, 
Athens, a praise without end. 

Swinburne, in Erechtheus. 
202 



FIFTY YEARS OF DISTIN- 
GUISHED WORKS 

A DEFENSIVE WAR: DEMOCRACY IN ATHENS 

With the Hellenes the inevitable law, grad- 
ual transformation through minute, continual 
change, had been working for centuries. 
Still no satisfactory solution of the ethical 
questions of life had they found at any point 
within the individualistic period of their de- 
velopment. The selfish energy of the age 
was too great. A sense of the worth of our 
moral nature had not been wanting. But 
there was needed a purifying of spirit, an 
ordeal, an enthusiasm or a woe, to clarify the 
people's ideas before the supreme blossom of 
the Greek spirit could unfold its unrivaled 
splendor to the world. An evolution doubt- 
less more rapid than at any other time among 
any other people was pending. 

Unity the Greeks had — in their language 
and its treasured poems, in common religious 
faiths, in festivals of clan and city, and in 

203 



204 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

national games. ' i Greece is of one blood, and 
of one speech,' ' Herodotus reports the Athe- 
nians reminding Spartan envoys, "and has 
dwelling places of the gods in common, and 
sacrifices and habits and kindred customs.' ' 
The Hellenes' diversity lay in their political 
life, in an intense individualistic segregation 
of the various polities of cities and small 
states. Their diversity had been disuniting, 
for instance, the Ionians of the Asiatic coast. 
Years before these people had revolted 
against the Persian ruler and his satraps 
whose conquering empire already extended, 
wrote Herodotus, from regions of insupport- 
able heat to insupportable cold. 

Among these Asiatic Ionians, with their in- 
stinct for autonomy there went a suspicious 
fidelity, distrust of one another's good faith, 
and sequent lukewarm spirit of cooperation 
against the Persian ; an incapacity to submit 
themselves to discipline, which was an ill-form 
of their Greek individualism; and an impa- 
tience of steady and persevering toil, which 
companioned their semi-orientalization. 
Add to this havoc-working condition the 
personal jealousies of expelled and pervert 
Hellenes, the fact that no one of the Asiatic 



A UNIFYING ENTHUSIASM 205 

Greek states possessed the material power, 
united with energy and ability, to constitute 
itself uncontroverted leader, and we see how 
the Persians' lust for empire subjected those 
islanders. Then, too, terror-stricken at the 
horrors the Persians visited upon conquered 
peoples and lands, the Greeks of Asia pur- 
posely lessened resistance. Their Hellenic 
kin on the European mainland, especially the 
young democrats of Athens, were not blind to 
the miseries of the Ionian cities and islands 
of Asia, and the cruelties put upon them by 
the subjugating and exterminating powers of 
Persia. The fellow-feeling of the Athenians 
with their colony and allies, Miletus, for in- 
stance, was profound, and when the poet 
Phrynichus made that city's conquest the 
subject of a tragedy, their sensibilities, al- 
though moved to tears at the theater, meas- 
ured a thousand drachmas as the right fine 
for his temerity in "representing to them 
their own misfortunes.'' 

The enthusiasm which was to unite and 
definitely to establish the civic life of Euro- 
pean Hellas was not long delayed. Hosts 
collected in Persian Asia and poured down 
upon the devoted Hellenes. Xerxes, the Per- 



206 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

sian autocrat, had inherited the idea of 
the invasion of European Greece. But he 
lacked the intense wrath against Athens that 
had stimulated his father Darius, and his ex- 
pedition he might never have undertaken had 
not courtiers unceasingly urged him to the 
conquest — not only Persian courtiers hut also 
treacherous Greeks banished from their 
home-city for some cause, haunting the pal- 
ace at Susa, and looking to a restoration of 
their power under a Persian satrapy. 

Probably never before or since, in any re- 
corded history, for one end, under one com- 
mand, has there assembled a body so great 
and so diverse and alien as the Persian now 
led by his personal and despotic will across 
the Hellespont bridge of boats — seven days 
and nights it is reported the host was cross- 
ing — and towards the slender land of Hellas 
and its children of light. 

Athens and Sparta sought to organize 
against the barbarian hordes. They united 
in convening at the Isthmus of Corinth a con- 
gress representative of every city-state of 
Hellenic race and speech. They entreated 
the broadly scattered Hellenes to come to- 
gether in trust and brotherhood for the one 



A UNIFYING ENTHUSIASM 207 

purpose needed by the whole Hellenic family 
— defense of Hellas, preservation of their 
race-blood as well as of race-spirit. 

This general federation, with Sparta as 
presiding power, sent defenders to stem the 
Persian onflow. Their stand was at Thermop- 
ylae. How those men discharged their duty 
in that narrow pass has been for every cen- 
tury since a sublime ensample of patriotic 
devotion. Not alone the band of Spartans 
and Thespians, every Hellene not in exile or 
medizing suffered an equal pitch of resolu- 
tion. The famed victories of Salamis and 
Plataea and Mycale followed. 

Those contests were fateful days and the 
sole hope of not only the then Hellenes, but 
of the heirs of Hellas in the ages to come of a 
nobly human civilization. To the victors of 
that day, forcing back orientalism and its in- 
vasion of Europe, our civilization owes op- 
portunities to-day. The Asian autocrat had 
found the Hellenes equal to the reputation 
Artabanus had given them, ' ' They are a peo- 
ple, ' ' he had warned his nephew, ' ' said to be 
the best both by land and sea." 

When we realize the development of Greece 
in the one hundred years following these 



208 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

events, and the mighty gift of her spirit to 
all later times, we stand appalled at what 
the destinies of mankind would donbtless 
have been had the Persian hordes precipi- 
tated themselves on the Hellenes before their 
unity was accomplished. It might have hap- 
pened. Twenty years before a sultana of 
Darius and the mother of Xerxes, Atossa, at 
the instigation of a homesick Greek surgeon 
captive at the court of Susa, had urged such 
an attack. 

Of products of Greek liberty the Persians 
themselves must for more than a generation, 
have been conscious. In the expedition of 
Darius against the Scythians many years be- 
fore (that is, about 515 before Christ), the 
Hellenes had effected all operations calling 
for intelligence. For instance, the Greek 
architect, Mandrocles of Samos, bridged with 
boats the Hellespont, and the Ionians of the 
islands and the Asiatic coast had united to 
put a span over the Danube, then esteemed, 
says Herodotus, the greatest of rivers. 

So necessary to give complete realization 
to the national spirit was this struggle the 
people now undertook, that its issuance at 
this juncture seems providential. To the 



A UNIFYING ENTHUSIASM 209 

Greek generations that followed it was a re- 
ligious drama setting out the profoundest 
sentiments of the Hellenes. It expressed an 
ethical sense attributed also to the Persians : 
"God permits no one to have high thoughts 
but himself," an old uncle had cautioned 
Xerxes. 1 In his drama of "The Persians" 
^Eschylus leads the ghost of Darius to utter a 
kindred sentiment, "When anyone, himself, 
hastens to ruin, God abets him. ' ' 

In resistance to the Persian the Greek be- 
came conscious of his own superiority — con- 
scious of his freedom and his thought which 
were the ground of his superiority. Persia 
was in externals more civilized than Greece. 
Luxury was better understood at Susa than 
at Athens, and industries were more diversi- 
fied in the enormous cities of old Assyria and 
of Egypt than in Hellas. But the mind of 
Persia was stationary: the spirit of Hellas 
progressive. Nowhere save in Greece had 
men learned to think, and to depend upon 
their own spirit for guidance. This lesson 
the Hellenes had been getting by heart 

1 In this, and also in other speeches of Persians 
quoted from Herodotus, the sentiment is, probably, 
Greek. 



210 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

through the foregoing centuries of struggling 
individualism. The great war in which their 
skill in military combination and orderly 
courage triumphed over unorganized, inef- 
ficient force and the imbecile self -acclamation 
and fatuous confidence of Persia, wrote it be- 
fore their eyes in sun-clear truth. 

When her people had pushed back the bar- 
barians ' chaotic force Greece came out 
brighter and stronger than before. The iron 
of her spirit had been heated. She had been 
in the furnace and forge of a defensive war. 
She had needed to be molded by such blows 
as only the formidable empire of the Persians 
could give before she could stand to later 
peoples the invincible, self-conscious em- 
bodiment of her Pallas Athene. She had 
come to the highest plane of national life. 
She was conscious of carrying and sustain- 
ing the spirit of her race. She had made 
evident that the difference between Hellene 
and barbarian was the difference between 
free culture and routine, liberty and slavery, 
progress and stagnation, humanity with its 
instrument of reason and dsemonism. 

A successful carrying through of a great 
military movement actively stimulates the 



DEMOCRATIC SENTIMENT 211 

political sentiment and the consciousness of 
citizenship, and leads to demand for fuller 
and completer political dignity. Athens had 
been the life and soul of the Greeks' resist- 
ance to Persian invasion headed by Datis ten 
years before the inroad of Xerxes. At that 
time the combat and victory at Marathon of 
her "embattled farmers," citizen-democrats, 
single-handed save for their brethren from 
Platsea, had given surpassing example of the 
stoutness of heart and the clarity of head her 
institutions engendered. 

Thus during these wars and so at their 
end, Athens came forth with startling bril- 
liance. She had made evident that she had 
the vigor, self-confidence and aggressive ac- 
tivity to execute what her spirit had thought 
out, that she was filled with ardor and pa- 
tient of labor. "We ourselves know the 
power of the Persian is many times greater 
than ours," said the Athenians before the 
battle of Plataea to a medizing Thessalian 
king, an envoy of the Persians; "It is not 
necessary to insult us with that. Neverthe- 
less we so cling to freedom that we shall use 
what strength we have. Do not try to per- 
suade us to come to terms with the barba- 



212 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

rian. We never shall. Tell him the Athe- 
nians say that as long as the sun goes in the 
path in which it now moves, they will never 
come to terms with Xerxes. Bring us no 
such proposition again. Think not to succor 
us by persuading us to unrighteousness. ' ' 
Like all Greek states Athens was small, 
and each citizen fulfilled his duties directly 
in person, not by deputy. For a quarter of 
a century before Thermopylae constitutional 
democracy had prevailed. Under it the 
Athenian character had developed marvel- 
ously. Self-government had become habit- 
ual. The people had learned to determine 
for themselves, and to accept the decision of 
the majority. They were active. They were 
daring. They had patient endurance. They 
had energy to work — that high energy that 
comes from consciousness of real greatness. 
They had the matchless discipline that works 
give. Their organizing energy had increased 
their power of resistance. The spirit of even 
the poorest had caught the glow of political 
equality, the pride of the service of public 
life, the ideal of the city-state that shone be- 
fore the Hellenes for generations, long be- 
fore Plato constructed his perfect state — the 



DEMOCRATIC SENTIMENT 213 

faith that he, the man of simple life, also was 
a contributing part to the beanty and sym- 
metry. Attica was now one and indivisible. 

But how were affairs moving in that 
cluster of villages that formed the heart of 
Laconia in the middle valley of the Eurotas? 
— in "lovely Lacedaemon?" Sparta's long- 
settled constitution, her rigid Dorian life and 
discipline, and her organized " war-men' ' had 
in the past given her an ascendency and the 
presidency of the pan-Hellenic union. More 
than ten years before the Persian snuffing- 
out at Plataea and Mycale, when the people 
of iEgina gave earth and water to heralds of 
Darius in token of their submission, the 
Athenians preferred complaint at Sparta that 
the ^Eginetans had been guilty of treason to 
Hellas. "For the general benefit of Hellas," 
therefore, Sparta dealt with the .ZEginetans. 
These deeds first manifested Hellas as an ag- 
gregate body. 

But now flagrant misconduct of Spartan 
power brought into clear light Athens' ef- 
ficient command and preeminence. A power- 
ful and voluntary movement proclaimed her 
leader at sea. This had its spring in a sense 
of justice. Still it meant that a schism had 



214 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

cleft the national polity, but little before 
shining with great evidence to the eyes of 
all men. The divided spirit Athens and 
Sparta embodied now divided the Greek 
world. In every city-state political divisions 
between the oligarchic and democratic fac- 
tion lay, that is, in sympathies with the 
energetic democracy of Athens, whose as- 
cendency was awakening the jealousy of the 
conservative allies of Sparta, or in support 
of conservative, home-keeping traditions of 
Sparta allied with the Peloponnesian states 
and landsmen and with native oligarchs in- 
imical to organized union of states. The 
struggle was between oligarchic and demo- 
cratic faction within the town, we said. 
Whatever their affiliation, there remained 
the belief, instinctive in the mind of Hellenes, 
that in every city-state autonomy was neces- 
sary to free citizens. 

Maritime states freely and spontaneously 
gravitated toward radical Athens, aggressive, 
energetic, keeping to steady effort, organiz- 
ing the navy supplied for expelling the bar- 
barians from the JEgean, collecting taxes 
levied for their common security, enforcing 
loyalty to a great pan-Hellenic purpose, mak- 



DEMOCRATIC SENTIMENT 215 

ing confederacy against the Persians an ef- 
ficient working reality. For the new Hellas 
Athens was virtually leader. Her very geog- 
raphy had destined her for the most perfect 
of the city-states. In gifts of the spirit she 
had focused the many-sidedness of Greek 
life and embodied its unity. 

Athens was now become the citadel, "the 
asty of Hellas,' ' as Isocrates later called her. 
Her name meant Hellas. Within herself her 
children were illustrating the economic law 
of the most vigorous social systems— of the 
individual, he having the highest possible de- 
velopment of his own personality, subordinat- 
ing himself to the interest of the social 
whole. 

Athens found her headship complete when, 
attracted by her success, new allies sought 
her leadership, and the common funds of the 
League of Delos were transferred from the 
island of Delos to the acropolis of Athens. 
The form of her dominion was a protectorate, 
the preservation of which seemed to be one 
with her own life. By force of circumstances 
she had become head of a compact which 
bound each individual state and, by their 
good-will and agreement, mistress of an irre- 



216 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

sistible navy. An empire through gradual 
and unforeseen stages was thrust upon 
her. 

With security and peace the idea of de- 
velopment burgeoned in Attica. Its fruits 
should be political right and order which 
their Solon of earlier centuries had sought. 
In spite of political control by landed 
families, the idea, we have said, had been in 
Athens, the idea of a democracy, self-govern- 
ing and responsible to itself — a democracy in- 
creased by wealth from growth of industry 
and commerce and the wants of a prospering 
middle class; also by a large body of navy 
coming to the fore, for "wooden walls," 
ships manned chiefly by marines of lower 
orders, had saved Athens at the battle of 
Salamis. 

Free male Athenians who had reached the 
age of manhood formed the Assembly meet- 
ing, three or four times a month, in the open 
air, on a hillside, the Pnyx, and with charac- 
teristic Athenian religiosity opening its sit- 
tings with prayer. The prerogative of the 
body was supreme power in all most impor- 
tant matters of state. A council of Five Hun- 
dred managed details of the business, and es- 



DEMOCRATIC SENTIMENT 217 

pecially they considered and sanctioned every 
law proposed to the Assembly. 2 

New life and new sense of responsibility 
and power also developed among the poorer 
people by the establishment of a jury, which 
judged of law as well as of fact 3 — paid 
courts often panels of five hundred men each. 
The Council of the Areopagus before this had 
been a court of special importance and bril- 
liance, its members elected for life. It was 
doubtless a continuation of the old Homeric 
council of elders, and had a semi-religious 
weight, carrying in itself admonitory and 
censorial powers over the whole people, and 
possessed of a moral influence that outweighs 
the opinion of a mere court of justice. The 
prestige of this senate of the Areopagus, 
Pericles and his associates, in the radical 
movement now going on in 463-2 before 

2 This rule preserves a relic of Solon's check to the 
democracy he expanded against the oligarchs, namely, 
that selected men should first approve every proposal 
brought before the yearly meeting of citizens. Pay for 
attendance at the sovereign Athenian Assembly did not 
begin till later, when an allotment of three obols a day 
attracted the poor and unemployed. 

3 Sometimes, in eminent modern opinion, confound- 
ing law and fact. 



218 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

Christ, distinctly lessened. The new juries 
almost stripped the court of judicial power. 
Such an act alone meant a minimizing of the 
conservative and aristocratic influence. In 
these times also choice by lot was established 
for archonship and election to the Council of 
Five Hundred, and every citizen had the 
chance of holding political office. 

Heretofore the active life of the Athenian 
men had been mainly in military affairs. 
Now it was in civic functions. The jury 
courts of perpetual session were a consum- 
mation of the democratic sentiment. The 
number of the jury, the impossibility of fore- 
knowing who would sit in a cause, and the 
secret vote defended its members from cor- 
ruption and fear. Each citizen member must 
have become thirty years old ; therefore they 
were mature in judgment. 

These courts were solemn from sheer 
numerical force. They stimulated to, and 
also gained from, the just, measured balan- 
cing to which the Hellenic mind was especially 
sensitive. They roused thought and con- 
sciousness of the dignity of citizenship. 
Their weakening effect was that, absorbing 
his time in discussion and judging, they neces- 



DEMOCRATIC SENTIMENT 219 

sitated the giving over by the qualified 
Athenian of business duties to the excluded 
slaves, freemen and foreigners. In these 
higher aims for the elect, there must have 
grown a contempt for trade or wealth-getting, 
and for whatever occupation might so ab- 
sorb a man that he had not ample leisure for 
the corporate activities of the state — a con- 
tempt, finally, after several decades, elabo- 
rating into the dilettant spirit we find in 
Hellas — when Hellas was no longer Hellas. 

These juries had in their hands the super- 
intendence and competence of affairs of the 
Athenian empire. Cities that paid tribute to 
the confederacy — one thousand, Aristophanes 
says, but the tribute lists give fewer — looked 
to Athens for arbitration between members, 
for regulation of state with state, for trial 
of grave causes and for enforcement of 
justice and obligations of the confederacy. 
From Athens' presidency of the union and 
the empowering of her to enforce her de- 
cisions, there gradually grew in her a judicial 
authority which contributed greatly to the 
prestige of the Athenian empire. 

Two hundred years and more before these 
times, in the first outburst of the age called 



220 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

lyric, we have noted how rising emotion of 
the individual and his self-expression went 
with the introduction of papyrus, a record 
easily got for personal utterance. Again 
popular media developed power of self-ex- 
pression. In these jury courts procedure 
was by word of mouth. The simplest citizen 
should be able to plead his own cause, to 
carry the thread of discourse, to reason with 
brevity, to color his advocacy with ethical 
sentiment. Oratory, that strange magic art 
of persuasion, of directing by argument the 
convictions and wills of one's fellow citizens, 
always in its uses an associate of free govern- 
ment — oratory sprang forward. Ehetoric 
became a preparation for real life. 

With the Hellenes ' quickness to fit means to 
ends these juries led to professional speech 
writers, that is, to writers of speeches for 
litigants, and uniting with the dialectic de- 
velopment in philosophy, to rhetors and 
sophists. "With such popular courts were not 
only associated Greek oratory and its allied 
didactic rhetoric and grammar, but from 
them ethical philosophy and political had 
great stimulus. Moreover, they served to in- 



DEMOCRATIC SENTIMENT 221 

crease the respect embedded in the Athenian 
character for judicial formalities. 

Law the Greeks had venerated from the 
early time of a Lycurgus in Sparta and a So- 
lon in Athens, when its creator was believed 
to be inspired. This sentiment of theirs had 
increased in the foregoing centuries of evolv- 
ing individualism. 4 In the time of Pericles, 
when the state was a brotherhood of equal 
men, spontaneously the Athenians looked for 
protection to constitutional forms. Laws 
had life, individuality, speaking personality. 
During the prevalence of the old education 
they were not abstractions, not barren prin- 
ciples so remote from every-day life as to be 
written down and forgotten. In one phase 
they were even intimacies of the social life, 
set to music and chanted after dinner. In 
another, they were the voice of impartial 
reason, august, moral existences dwelling in 
the midst of the people, united with whom 
was good life, freedom. They were per- 
suasive associates, familiars, who attempted 
to bring and keep among men an ideal justice, 
as the embodied laws that speak in awe- 

4 This we have seen on foregoing page 96, 



222 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

inspiring sentence to Socrates in Plato's 
"Crito." Laws created the institutions of 
his state most sacred to the Hellene. Their 
collective voice was what fellow citizens com- 
manded. "Service to the law is service to 
the gods," said Plato. 

When faith in the laws' relationship with 
an ideal, divine justice failed, when the indi- 
vidual no longer circumscribed his will to the 
clarified and systematized will of his fellow- 
citizens, the institutions they had protected 
tottered. But still, even at the end of Greek 
freedom, Demosthenes vigorously taught the 
Athenians that the law was a part of them- 
selves and representative of the character of 
all who belong to the state, and they "belong- 
ing to themselves" ought to live in accord 
with it. To do this was freedom. 

But now, at this time, Pericles, President 
of the evolving Athenian democracy, met op- 
position in a body of conservatives. The re- 
served nature of the radical leader prompted 
him to look not to extension of empire, but 
rather to the ordering and beautifying of that 
already given. Against his effort to direct 
democratic zeal, the "honorable and respect- 



DEMOCRATIC SENTIMENT 223 

able" body of conservatives, the anti-demo- 
cratic body, contended that upbuilding and 
beautifying of Athens by money of the 
confederacy was malversation, that the fund 
should be spent in active war against the 
barbarians. 

Sensitive to the genius of his day, Pericles 
answered that the city had already, by the 
year 466, cleared Europe and the iEgean of 
the Persian, the end for which the tax was 
given, that now Athens might rightfully 
spend a part of the fund in enlarging and 
strengthening her walls, magazines and 
docks, in clothing herself in a majesty fitting 
her as the center of Hellenic feeling, the 
leader of Hellenic intellect and will, and in 
delighting her own people and strangers 
flocking to behold the surpassing beauty of 
her musical and poetic festivals and the 
matchless art of her temples. Such work as 
Athens had undertaken was properly pan- 
Hellenic, the statesman claimed with irresist- 
ible eloquence. A population engaged in 
Athens' adornment — miners, marble-cutters, 
masons, carpenters, ivory cutters, goldsmiths, 
painters, road-makers, tool-makers and mend- 



224 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

ers, carters, sailors, the body supplying daily 
needs of these, — all must have upheld this 
most regal argument. 

"We ourselves assembled here to-day," 
spoke Pericles in his speech upon those fallen 
in the first year of the Peloponnesian war 
(431), "we assembled here to-day, who are 
still most of us in the vigor of life, have car-, 
ried the work of improvement further, and 
have richly endowed our city with all things, 
so that she is sufficient for herself both in 
peace and war. Of the military exploits by 
which our various possessions were acquired, 
or of the energy with which we or our fathers 
drove back the tide of war, Hellenic or Bar- 
barian, I will not speak ; for the tale would be 
long and is familiar to you. . . . 

' 'Our form of government does not enter 
into rivalry with the institutions of others. 
We do not copy our neighbors, but are an ex- 
ample to them. It is true that we are called 
a democracy, for the administration is in the 
hands of the many and not of the few. But 
while the law secures equal justice to all 
alike in their private disputes, the claim of 
excellence is also recognised; and when a 
citizen is in any way distinguished, he is pre- 



PERICLES' ESTIMATE OF ATHENIANS 225 

ferred to the public service, not as a matter 
of privilege, but as the reward of merit. 
Neither is poverty a bar, but a man may bene- 
fit his country whatever be the obscurity of 
his condition. There is no exclusiveness in 
our public life, and in our private intercourse 
we are not suspicious of one another, nor 
angry with our neighbor if he does what he 
likes; we do not put on sour looks at him 
which, though harmless, are not pleasant. 
While we are thus unconstrained in our 
private intercourse, a spirit of reverence per- 
vades our public acts ; we are prevented from 
doing wrong by respect for the authorities 
and for the laws, having an especial regard 
to those which are ordained for the protec- 
tion of the injured as well as to those un- 
written laws which bring upon the trans- 
gressor of them the reprobation of the gen- 
eral sentiment. 

"And we have not forgotten to provide for 
our weary spirits many relaxations from 
toil; we have regular games and sacrifices 
throughout the year; our homes are beauti- 
ful and elegant; and the delight which we 
daily feel in all these things helps to banish 
melancholy. Because of the greatness of our 



226 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

city the fruits of the whole earth flow in 
upon us; so that we enjoy the goods of other 
countries as freely as of our own. . . . 

"We are lovers of the beautiful, yet simple 
in our tastes, and we cultivate the mind with- 
out loss of manliness. Wealth we employ, 
not for talk and ostentation, but when there 
is a real use for it. To avow poverty with us 
is no disgrace; the true disgrace is in doing 
nothing to avoid it. An Athenian citizen 
does not neglect the state because he takes 
care of his own household; and even those 
of us who are engaged in business have a 
very fair idea of politics. We alone regard 
a man who takes no interest in public affairs, 
not as a harmless, but as a useless character ; 
and if few of us are originators, we are all 
sound judges of a policy. The great impedi- 
ment to action is, in our opinion, not discus- 
sion, but the want of that knowledge which 
is gained by discussion preparatory to action. 
For we have a peculiar power of thinking be- 
fore we act and of acting too, whereas other 
men are courageous from ignorance but hesi- 
tate upon reflection. And they are surely to 
be esteemed the bravest spirits who, having 
the clearest sense both of the pains and 



RACE SPIRIT IN TECTONIC ARTS 227 

pleasures of life, do not on that account 
shrink from danger. In doing good, again, 
we are unlike others ; we make our friends by 
conferring, not by receiving favors. ... To 
sum up: I say that Athens is the school of 
Hellas, and that the individual Athenian in 
his own person seems to have the power of 
adapting himself to the most varied forms 
of action with the utmost versatility and 
grace. This is no passing and idle word, but 
truth and fact; and the assertion is verified 
by the position to which these qualities have 
raised the state." 5 

ARCHITECTURE ADORNING ATHENS: SCULP- 
TURE AND ALLIED ARTS 

Arts never equaled in any other fifty years 
of human history marked the half of a cen- 
tury between two fateful wars. A noble 
grace, long evolving, matured in the compar- 
ative quietude Greece enjoyed, and impelled 
a most rich and wonderful architectural cre- 
ation. Now through the unity, energy and 
excelling strength of the people and times, 

5 The passage is quoted from Jowett's translation of 
Thueydides by permission of the Delegates of the Ox- 
ford University Press. 



228 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

Athens came to embody in concrete expres- 
sion, for many centuries and even to this day, 
great, formative ideas. 

The independent conceptions resting on a 
common race basis had already given to the 
Hellenic system of building the styles called 
Doric and Ionic. Eelevancy of means to 
ends, severe logic, marked the Doric order. 
In the Doric column, austere, simple, un- 
adorned and with no separate foot, repress- 
ive of expression of self, supporting a boldly 
projecting capital, is traced the Doric idea 
of the merging of the individual in the mass. 
It was the form which evolving from the 
Doric nature, showed how each should con- 
tribute to the support of the community. 
Wholly and entirely each belonged to and 
must be judged in relation to his value to the 
state. Standing by itself the column tells 
the onlooker to expect more than in itself it 
presents. That is, the spirit of the column 
is for the whole — its own inner sternly self- 
centered force expressing security, repress- 
ing individual wishes and aspiration, stunts 
its height which is only five and one-half 
times its diameter — all to support the great 
and glorious unit of its architrave, frieze and 



RACE SPIRIT IN TECTONIC ARTS 229 

the rhythmic adornment completed in the 
pediment or gable. 

The graceful Ionic column, on the other 
hand, animated, free in play of fancy, de- 
manding and standing on its own base, whose 
beauty is complete within itself, spending its 
strength in slender shoots upwards and in 
airy decoration, is eight and one-half to nine 
and one-half times its greatest diameter. 
Its spirit of individual expression inserts a 
cushion of carved stone between the column 
and the weight it supports, molds the 
cushion which must soften the weight, and 
seizes upon the flower of the honeysuckle, 
upon leaves of the forest and other lines of 
grace and delight to the eye to deck its indi- 
viduality in rich variety. 

These two systems, the Doric and Ionic, 
the age of Pericles blended in the perfect 
form of the Attic. Subject to Doric influ- 
ences the Ionic column became less slender. 
Its capital took on energy in its swelling 
volutes, and the mass resting on the column 
more simplicity and emphasis. These modi- 
fications conveyed the feeling of strength in 
the column and sense of the supereminent 
mass. Exquisite proportion, chaste ele- 



230 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

gance, richness of decoration yet reserved 
before luxury, piquancy and mere attractive- 
ness, mark it. 

Under the influence of Athenian political 
freedom art had become pan-Hellenic, and 
artists might unite the aesthetic genius of the 
iEgean Ionian, rich, florid, complex, sensi- 
tive, and the disciplined order and zeal of 
the Achaean Dorian. This development in 
the world of art is one of many evidences 
that the Greek race was in its perfectness 
an amalgamation of northern and southern 
elements — that it possessed the artistic 
genius of the southern iEgeans, and the in- 
stinct and genius filled with a passion for 
religion and government of northern, Ger- 
manic peoples. 

It is the age of Pheidias, the matchless 
sculptor and foreman of public art works at 
Athens, of the master architects, Ictinus, Cal- 
ibrates and their fellow workers, all con- 
sciously glorifying the unity of Greece in the 
grace and splendor of temples, and embody- 
ing in statues the Hellene's idea of the di- 
vine. In Athens rose the Theseum, standing 
in purity of line to-day and reported built 
in that day to the mythical champion of 



RACE SPIRIT IN TECTONIC ARTS 231 

Athenian democracy, Theseus, an entomb- 
ment for his bones and vesting within itself 
the privilege of sanctuary to those who were 
poor and oppressed by cruel usage. The 
colonnaded Propylsea or Foregate of the 
Acropolis also arose; the stately Erectheum 
to protect venerated insignia of an antique, 
religious legend which connected the snake 
with underworld power and fertility charm; 
and the elegant temple of the Wingless Vic- 
tory. The main body of these temples 
gleamed with the rich luster of marble, but 
painting and gilding adorned the upper 
parts. 

The form of the Parthenon, to the cult of 
Athene Parthenos, tells that the religious 
base of the spirit that built it was Doric 
puritanism — throughout Hellas, in fact, 
Doric forms prevailed as the religious man- 
ner. Entrance to the Parthenon's full per- 
fection led through that Foregate, or Propy- 
laea, which united in its fortress-like court 
Ionic ornament and cheer for festivals with 
Doric seriousness and strength for defense. 
In choosing the Doric form for the Par- 
thenon, the subtle sense of the Hellenes for the 
perfect expression of a spirit merely em- 



232 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

bodied a law set forth by all later history, 
namely, that the puritan spirit of a nation is 
that upon which the nation is upbuilt and 
round which it centers: in whatever degree 
that spirit is minimized or nihilized, in so 
far the national life suffers — perhaps be- 
cause that spirit demands for itself simplic- 
ity, devotion, setting aside of self and trivial- 
ities for the commonwealth, and keeping 
down pride and hollow, deadening ritual that 
vaunt themselves. 

The beauty of these temples of the Acrop- 
olis of Athens, it should be noted, was built 
upon a thoroughly scientific foundation and 
knowledge of stone construction. Even 
more: — In their analysis and differentiation 
of parts, the builders used various devices 
to heighten their art that our duller sense 
of to-day only knows through study of their 
works. The neighboring Mount Pentelicus, 
pushing its peaked summit into Attic clouds, 
offered quarries of marble and afforded 
architect and sculptor abundant supply of 
raw material for re-creation into perfect 
form. 

What titanic strides the Athenians were 
taking! In these years of labor they built 



RACE SPIRIT IN TECTONIC ARTS 233 

the Parthenon, beginning the work in 447 be- 
fore Christ, and carrying it structurally so 
far that by the year 438 they dedicated the 
gold and ivory statue of The Virgin, that is, 
Athene. What manifestation of their so- 
cial life the building gives ! Upon what con- 
ceptions of civic distinction they reared it, 
that marble' hymn to victorious Wisdom, 
and at last carried on their worship within 
its walls! To realize it consider again the 
state of the world about this handful of 
Aryan folk embodying for the first time ideas 
of an organized, law-governed, democratic 
state, and the lucid intelligence of man as 
its tutelary goddess. Nomadic, unorganized 
peoples over the mountain cap to the north, 
groups not unlike westward beyond the coast 
of the Ionian sea, and gross orientalism 
among the hordes within the Persian empire 
to the east, and south in the Egyptian sa- 
trapy. But in the center of the then known 
world these Hellenes, people of light, them- 
selves evolving and advancing the idea of 
distinction, a state formed of free individuals 
and governed by those who formed it, desir- 
ing beauty expressed in perfect proportions 
as they desired the perfection of the people 's 



234 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

civic life. This is the story the building of 
the Parthenon tells. Eeligion and demo- 
cratic zeal have rarely so united to warm the 
heart of a people. 

Heights of devotion chiseled the Par- 
thenon's perfection. And in return, in the 
great and indefinable action and reaction of 
race and race-work and the individual, to 
what inspiration did it hold its people! To 
the service of the whole body of citizens — 
not in the individual's dwelling and' his os- 
tentatious luxury, but in temple and other 
public buildings. Their directing divinity, 
the spirit of clear-eyed Thought, Reason, Re- 
flection, Athene, foster-mother of heroes 
after the old matrilineal fashion, giver of 
arts of war and of peace, fertility blesser of 
the Athenian in granting the nourishing olive 
and their praiseworthy climate, genetrix of 
their beloved city, Pheidias had visualized by 
a statue standing forty-seven feet high in the 
sanctuary of the Parthenon. The flesh parts 
of this most noble presentation were Pheid- 
ian-carved ivory and the draperies of Pheid- 
ian-carved gold. A golden sphinx-mounted 
helmet covered the erected and stately head 
of the statue, lance and shield stood on the 



RACE SPIRIT IN TECTONIC ARTS 235 

ground near by in sign of peace, and from 
her hand a statue of Victory six feet in 
height, her wings outstretched, held forward 
a golden wreath — for in this sanctuary vic- 
tors in the pan-Athenian games received 
their prizes. The image featured the peo- 
ple's piety and consciousness that their 
own intelligence and religious emotion had 
evolved the idea it represented, and had 
prompted the great sculptor's ideal. 

The Hellenes' clear and fertile imagi- 
nation humanized, as we have seen, their con- 
ceptions of the divine force underlying all 
phenomena. God took on human form in 
early times. Sculpture with the Hellenes 
began its life far back in pre-Greek days, in 
the images it made to suggest or feature con- 
ceptions of the gods. The art was doubtless 
a chief medium for expressing race feeling 
and race solution of the passage of man — the 
never-dying questioning, whence came he! — 
how wrought he here? — whither went he? 
Its outworking grew gradually. It reflected 
mental distortion at times doubtless, and 
monstrous creations penetrating its centuries 
of growth. The sculptor was struggling for 
mastery of the idea and of his material. He 



236 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

was also failing in his technic. Images at- 
tributed to a traditional sculptor, Daedalus, 
have rigid and conventional forms. From 
such budding the art flowered in these years 
of The Great Peace. 

In their desire for beauty of form, their 
flexible, free development of and reverence 
for the body, the Hellenes apotheosized the 
body's merits. Greek dress of the classic 
age, its simplicity, its clinging to the body 
and portraying shape and movement, in- 
creased their sense of beauty of expression. 
The body's movements and attitudes deline- 
ated its spiritual life. This ancient folk not 
only had not found necessary a depicting 
perturbing emotion, the soul's shame of the 
body and poignant writings of the soul upon 
the face; to their aesthetics such excess was 
distasteful, false to art canon. Thus their 
art kept equilibrium. Mind and body, soul 
and material, worked together in union for 
the product. 

Through this proportion, this balance be- 
tween soul and body, this check of self -limi- 
tation so that neither exuberance of senti- 
ment nor pressure of reason should break 
poise, the Hellene's genius most naturally 



RACE SPIRIT IN TECTONIC ARTS 237 

conceived art in plastic expression. And in 
types. Distinct, unvarying, traditional ideals 
which possessed the imagination, impelled 
the great Greek art. The unchanging, an as- 
similation of the generic forms of life, gave 
these Hellenes' sculpture stability and raised 
it above ephemeral fancy and caprice to 
noble ideals. This was true not only of their 
sculpture but of all Greek art. Not the ac- 
cidental, such as the artist might meet in 
every-day life — not such individualizations; 
but rather the united consent and cooper- 
ation of Greek, souls of the group, the truly 
Hellenic, the universalized and majestic gods 
and heroes of an earlier day, each having a 
compacted power of his own, each identified 
with his own ethical function, each a com- 
ponent of emotions and thoughts and char- 
acter, each portraying a composite type — , 
"the image,' ' as Dion Chrysostom said, 
1 ' agreeing with all the epithets of the god. ' ' 6 

6 A face suffused with such thought and emotion as 
we assign to an ideally cultivated woman or man we 
gain in a composition-photograph of two or three hun- 
dred educated men or women. Not wholly unlike this 
photograph Greek sculpture made visible a universalized 
image of the greater gods. 



238 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

Just as their sculpture doubtless had birth 
in their religion, that is, the first subjects 
modeled by primitive artists symbolized a 
god, so in ideal images of the immortals the 
religion of the Greeks found solemn and 
sublime expression. The people's gratitude 
for the victory over the Persians and their 
warring glory Pheidias expressed in another 
significant work. His bronze statue of 
Athene Foremost in Battle, made of booty 
from the battle of Marathon, rose seventy 
feet in the "dazzling aether' ' of the city 
"violet-crowned, glorious." The Pheidian 
Athene embodied the type of the goddess 
of the old, matrilineal age, we have said, 
when, Plato declares, "the business of war 
had been the common concern of men and 
women," a goddess who demanded that the 
hero she had chosen to protect and inspire 
should do great deeds. Statues of these 
years alone set out that high companion- 
ship. Types of later workers than the Pheid- 
ian school, such as the Aphrodite of Praxite- 
les, are apt to embody ideas of the goddesses 
when, says a writer of to-day, they had be- 
come abject and amorous and sequestered 
to domestic servility. 



RACE SPIRIT IN TECTONIC ARTS 239 

A masterpiece of the preeminent Pheidias, 
the majesty and splendor of the seated Zeus 
at the common sanctuary of Hellas, Olympia, 
a statue embodying ethical conceptions of 
Power, Omniscience, Benevolence, many wit- 
nesses declared perfect. "The majesty of 
the work," said Quintilian, "was equal to 
the god." While Pheidias was fixing for- 
ever the type of Athene and Zeus, in Argos 
Polyclitus made a gold and ivory statue of 
Here, spouse of Zeus, "treading in golden 
sandals, ' ' typifying grace and beauty of 
women of the matrilineal system, reflecting 
that life and a most perfect physical form. 
All productions of this age have upon them 
the unmistakable impress of its spirit. 

Before these times of the elevation of 
Athens, of the art reflective of its political 
life and exigencies, before these peoples' de- 
light in the ideal representation of their 
great divinities and great deeds, families and 
schools of brass-founders and workers in 
gold and ivory had carried on their crafts 
in Argos, in Sparta and elsewhere. Now, 
Athens led to the complete development of 
facility and mastership in such arts. 

The city also attracted painters who com- 



240 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

panioned sculptors in interpreting race life. 
To glorify the works of her democracy she 
called Polygnotus, in 462, from Delphi, where 
he had painted the walls of a hall illustrating 
large scenes from Homer, such for instance 
as the descent of Odysseus into Hades. In 
Athens, and agreeably to current veneration, 
he and his fellow-workers pictured the bat- 
tle of Marathon within a compartment of the 
public portico called the Pcecile Stoa, a 
cloistered walk adorned besides with paint- 
ings such as scenes from the fall of Troy, 
and with statues, a haunt, in that sociable 
out-door life, of philosophers, nimble-witted 
rhetoricians and loungers eager for discus- 
sion, eager, too, for the last and best thing 
said. 

In vases of the Hellenes, thousands of 
which remain to us to-day, and in the com- 
monest utensils for the household, we have 
the Greek sense of form, in simple, dignified 
painting recalling, with ever-present, ever- 
significant motive, some god or hero. 

THE PELOPONNESIAN WAR: ITS RESULTS 

Mutations in the progression of the Greek 
spirit were of unexampled rapidity. Horror 



PARTY SPIRIT AND FRATRICIDAL WAR 241 

at the threatened defeat of their spirit by 
Persia originally nnited the Hellenes, and 
bore out the law that peoples capable of 
hearty consolidation emerge to power and 
dominion. The ultrarational clinging to 
race feeling, that spirit of loyalty to race in- 
stinct which had started back in those cen- 
turies when personality had not become iso- 
lated and the individual felt and thought 
through the group, that profound social senti- 
ment transcending local patriotism which 
subordinates all self-interest to the progress 
of the whole, led these Greeks to unite in 
their individualism. 

The dualism we have spoken of in fore- 
going pages — Athens at the head of mari- 
time powers, Sparta leading the Pelopon- 
nesian confederacy welded into one against 
Persia — had elements of friendliness. But 
when the conqueror was conquered, when 
fear of extinction by Asian inroad had died 
out, civil dissension followed. That per- 
sistent germ of disunion, the inability to 
unite except when threatened with extinc- 
tion, a Greek characteristic due in part to 
the geography of small island and tiny 
valley, was now multiform. ' 6 Hellas is one, ' ' 



242 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

said a Greek poet, "but its city-states many." 
"Fifty years passed between the retreat 
of Xerxes and the beginning of the war," 
testifies the eye-witness Thueydides, who 
called the Peloponnesian conflict the great- 
est event that had happened within the mem- 
ory of man. Jealousy, fear of the power of 
democratic Athens, continues Thueydides, 
seeing most of Hellas already subject to her, 
impelled to the hostilities. The Spartans 
felt that the Athenians were growing too 
strong to be ignored. Their determination 
to curb the strength of their compeer was not 
long looking for an excuse. They found it 
in a disturbance of the balance of power. 

"War is great folly," Pericles told the 
Athenians, "for those who are in prosperity 
and free to choose. But if they must either 
yield straightway to their neighbor, or ven- 
ture and win, then he who shuns the danger 
is more blameworthy than he who stands 
his ground." The Athenians stood their 
ground, and intertribal feuds stained Greek 
lands. "Civil war is as much worse than a 
foreign war," wrote Herodotus, himself far 
from the conflict, "as war itself is worse 
than peace." 



PARTY SPIRIT AND FRATRICIDAL WAR 243 

War prevailed, and when Attic soil-dwell- 
ers, driven by their enemies' invasion, 
crowded the city for protection, a material 
plague clasped hands with spiritual defeat. 
Pericles, the man of supreme character, died. 
Corrupt leaders succeeded him. Years 
passed and war went on. The Athenians, 
distraught, restlessly endeavoring after re- 
lief through constitutional changes and polit- 
ical experiment, were coming to attach them- 
selves to men— men looking to personal ad- 
vantage — more than to principles. 

Even in the face of freedom in Athens 
social inequality had persisted. Democratic 
institutions had not effaced sentiment at- 
tached to families in the line of old popu- 
lar heroes, for instance that of Alcibiades of 
the family of Ajax — never wholly discredited 
sentiment toward the old, supporting, influ- 
ential life of inheritance and its wealth ac- 
cumulating under the traditions of an acquis- 
itive, conservative stewardship. Anti-popu- 
lar combination and conspiracy had dwelt 
underworld throughout the democratic life 
of Athens, and now through breaking of 
hopes and through corruption gained ascend- 
ency. 



244 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

"The whole Hellenic world was in com- 
motion," says Thucydides in his history; "in 
every city the chiefs of the democracy and of 
the oligarchy were struggling, the one to 
bring in the Athenians, the other the Lace- 
daemonians. Now in time of peace, men 
would have had no excuse for introducing 
either, and no desire to do so; but, when 
they were at war, the introduction of a 
foreign alliance on one side or the other to 
the hurt of their enemies and the advantage 
of themselves was easily effected by the dis- 
satisfied party. And revolution brought 
upon the cities of Hellas many terrible ca- 
lamities, such as have been and always will 
be while human nature remains the same, 
but which are more or less aggravated and 
differ in character with every new combi- 
nation of circumstances. In peace and pros- 
perity both states and individuals' are actu- 
ated by higher motives, because they do not 
fall under the dominion of imperious neces- 
sities; but war, which takes away the com- 
fortable provision of daily life, is a hard 
master and tends to assimilate men's char- 
acters to their conditions. 

"When troubles had once begun in the 



PARTY SPIRIT AND FRATRICIDAL WAR 245 

cities, those who followed carried the revo- 
lutionary spirit further and further, and de- 
termined to outdo the report of all who had 
preceded them by the ingenuity of their en- 
terprises and the atrocity of their revenges. 
The meaning of words had no longer the 
same relation to things, but was changed by 
them as they thought proper. Eeckless dar- 
ing was held to be loyal courage; prudent 
delay was the excuse of a coward; moder- 
ation was the disguise of unmanly weakness ; 
to know everything was to do nothing. 
Frantic energy was the true quality of a 
man. . . . The lover of violence was always 
trusted, and his opponent suspected. He 
who succeeded in a plot was deemed know- 
ing, but a still greater master in craft was he 
who detected one. On the other hand, he 
who plotted from the first to have nothing 
to do with plots was a breaker up of parties 
and a poltroon who was afraid of the 
enemy. . . . The tie of party was stronger 
than the tie of blood, because a partisan was 
more ready to dare without asking why. 
(For party associations are not based upon 
any established law, nor do they seek the 
public good; they are formed in defiance of 



246 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

the laws and from self-interest.) The seal 
of good-faith was not divine law, but fellow- 
ship in crime. . . . 

' ' The cause of all these evils was the love of 
power, originating in avarice and ambition, 
and the party-spirit which is engendered by 
them when men are fairly embarked in a 
contest. For the leaders on either side used 
specious names, the one party professing to 
uphold the constitutional equality of the 
many, the other the wisdom of an aristoc- 
racy, while they made the public interests, 
to which in name they were devoted, in real- 
ity their prize. Striving in every way to 
overcome each other, they committed the 
most monstrous crimes. . . . Either by the 
help of an unrighteous sentence, or grasping 
power with the strong hand, they were eager 
to satiate the impatience of party-spirit. 
Neither faction cared for religion, but any 
fair pretence which succeeded in effecting 
some odious purpose was greatly lauded. 
And the citizens who were of neither party 
fell a prey to both ; either they were disliked 
because they held aloof, or men were jealous 
of their surviving. . . . 

"The simplicity which is so large an ele- 



PARTY SPIRIT AND FRATRICIDAL WAR 247 

ment in a noble nature was laughed to scorn 
and disappeared. An attitude of perfidious 
antagonism everywhere prevailed. . . . Each 
man was strong only in the conviction that 
nothing was secure ; he must look to his own 
safety, and could not afford to trust others. 
Inferior intellects generally succeeded best. 
For, aware of their own deficiencies, and 
fearing the capacity of their opponents, for 
whom they were no match in powers of 
speech, and whose subtle wits were likely to 
anticipate them in contriving evil, they 
struck boldly and at once. ' ' 7 

In the war each contestant over-estimated 
chance of success when success befell his 
state. Each lost measure between means 
and ends. Headlong desire for reprisal 
drove each destructively. After Athens met 
terrible reverses in Sicily, reverses so red- 
dened with excesses that like the massacre of 
St. Bartholomew, like the religious persecu- 
tions of the Thirty Years' War in Germany, 
they have become one of the horrors of his- 
tory, insinuating suggestions from Susa en- 

7 The passage is quoted from Jowett's translation of 
Thucydides by permission of the Delegates of the Ox- 
ford University Press. 



243 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

deavored, by detaching Greek towns from 
their support, to break the Athenian empire. 
"In the civil wars Persian intrigue was 
busy," says Thucydides. Intrigue won, and 
Spartans allied themselves with Persia to 
carry joint war against Athens and her allies. 

Athenian heroism persisted in endeavor to 
retain some fragment of her empire. This 
forlorn hope failed, and at last every city in 
alliance with, or dependent upon Athens sub- 
mitted to the supremacy of Sparta. Yet not 
Sparta, but rather union of Sparta with 
Persia had destroyed the political leadership 
of Athens, and borne out another law; — that 
races too little sympathetic to form powerful 
unions fall to subservience — the very op- 
posite of that law exemplified when the Hel- 
lenes ninety years before united against 
Persia. 

The repose of exhaustion followed the 
Peloponnesian war. "Whether the city of 
Athens was to dominate all Hellas in a Greek 
empire which had formed for her on the rise 
of the Athenian navy, or whether she were to 
be a mere republic of rank kindred to other 
Hellenic states had been tried out. An asser- 
tion of Herodotus, who died in the sixth year 



HISTORIANS 249 

of the war, suggests reflection upon its prog- 
ress and result. The Athenians, says the old 
historian, were of Pelasgic origin, that is, they 
were predominantly of the early, industrious, 
art-loving, peace-loving peoples; the Lace- 
daemonians, Doric, that is northern, war and 
dominion-loving. 



IMPERISHABLE HISTORIES OF HERODOTUS 
AND THUCYDIDES 

But before and during these eventful dec- 
ades, in this capital 

" Athens, the eye of Greece, mother of arts, 
And eloquence, native to famous wits," 

inspiration to flower and fructify stopped 
neither in architecture and its support- 
ing arts, nor in its imperial democracy. 
Need of the records of its mighty deeds 
rested on the human spirit — record of 
all the stirring and curious world before 
men's eyes — to amaze and edify future gen- 
erations. These Hellenes had the sense of 
race vocation, trusteeship, we have seen. 
Their gifts were not for themselves alone. 
They felt themselves charged with legacies to 



250 ' THE GREEK SPIRIT 

future generations. A Homer must appear, 
a first real seer of Hellenic history. The 
genius at hand was Herodotus, born in Asian 
Halicarnassus in 484 before Christ, himself 
an amalgam— of Dorian blood, he expressed 
the facile Ionian spirit. In his writing Greek 
prose literature became fairly developed. 

Oracular legends of an ancient enmity be- 
tween the Hellenes and Asiatic peoples had 
long been current, we have seen. Homer had 
told it in his battle of the Achaeans with the 
Asiatics. Tales of the actual present antag- 
onism and contest between these peoples had 
filled minds of at least two generations of 
Hellenes before Herodotus saw the light. 
Nothing could be more natural than for him 
to take the profaning war of Persian invasion 
for his subject, the conflict between the social 
will of Hellas and its challenging race, and 
interpret it with the religious imaginative- 
ness that characterized his times, making his 
groundwork an explication of the way of God 
to man. 

He wrote, he said, "to save from decay the 
remembrance of what men have done, and 
to prevent the mighty and marvelous actions 
of the Greeks and barbarians failing of their 



HISTORIANS 251 

meed of glory." He made an organic epic. 
A divine forethought, an envy of the gods, a 
mighty moral order, the finger of deity in all 
human affairs, the will of social progress, 
allots ruin even to the third and fourth gen- 
eration to the immoderateness of men, to 
their excess, arrogance and crime. That is 
the idea underlying the history of Herodotus. 
It colors the narrative, and the speeches 
which are lyric outbursts. The historian was 
saturated with the faith in human affairs of 
an ever-present retributive justice, Nemesis, 
which begetting in the godhead jealousy and 
enmity that man should aspire to power and 
nurse overwhelming ambition, humiliates hu- 
man pride : upon all men of foremost condi- 
tion disaster must come. A poet filled with 
a religious enthusiasm, he set out in his work 
action of the law of righteousness. Just as 
to the Jews in the Old Testament, so to this 
Greek historian, his race's history was the 
tribunal of the justice of God. 

The narrative of this ethnic story of He- 
rodotus, its candor and simplicity and persua- 
sion, its pathos, its human quality and the 
garrulous delight of its telling, fitted it for 
such recitation as epic lays enjoyed at festi- 



252 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

vals. Accounts say that the author gave a 
public reading and had pay therefor at the 
great pan-Athenaea of 446 before Christ. 

This detailed, dramatic recounting of the 
father of history sprang from the peace and 
fertility of the Hellenic spirit at the end of 
the Persian wars, and reflected conditions 
that inspired the early singers. Thucydides, 
born but thirteen years after Herodotus, also 
wrote a drama of which he was a painstak- 
ing, accurate, trustworthy eye-witness and 
doer-of deeds, — one may say drama because 
the form of the history of Thucydides shows 
permeation of the tragic spirit. His psychol- 
ogy is that of the drama, and his construction 
somewhat resembles the drama of ^Eschylus. 
In this story the parties are warring states 
and the end sought the leadership of Athens. 

But Thucydides is austere. He loves no 
detailed description, no old-fashioned, legend- 
ary tales as did his elder brother-historian. 
He analyzes character with keen penetration 
— what motives impelled the actors in affairs, 
what social forces produced the results. 
"Those who wish," he said, "to see clearly 
what has happened and what like events may 
hereafter happen, in the order of human af- 



GROUNDING OF THE DRAMA 253 

fairs, will find what I have written useful 
aids." His compact thought, his love of 
truth and dispassionate effort to justify the 
opposing parties as they would, and even 
then did, justify themselves, his distinct, 
precise, significant diction, his long vision, 
his close-knit reasoning with its quality of 
lasting validity, mark him as the first writer 
of vigorous, philosophical history, and one 
who vivified and enriched the writing of his- 
tory for all time. 

How the Greeks of their day saw the worth 
of life, their interpreting of life with ethical 
meaning, what to their religious sense was 
the divine will, the histories of Herodotus 
and Thucydides in one way show. But with 
Thucydides expression of religious emotion 
is translated into philosophic phrase. The 
inexplicable element in history he calls 
chance, tyche, Tu%y. 

RISE OF THE DRAMA: SUCH MASTERS AS 

^SCHYLUS, SOPHOCLES, EURIPIDES, 

ARISTOPHANES 

Through poetry, however, the Hellenic 
genius must again find expression fitted to 
its time, That welling of the spirit for ut- 



254 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

terance of the laws of human life, that cere- 
bral excitement that heats and molds ideas 
about it to the emotional pitch of rhythm, 
must again be a faithful voice of the age. 
Poetry has always thriven in great crises of 
history. That is, a literature can ground it- 
self only on the ethos, the faith and ethical 
concepts of a people. Its roots must be in 
their life. The sap that feeds it and gives 
it expansive strength and detailed beauty 
must come from the religious and ethical 
ardor of its people. 

A literature interpretative of race-con- 
sciousness we have seen the virid growth of 
since Homer. Of what the Greek muse ear- 
liest sang, when, in the full noontide of 
Homer's epic day, minstrel and rhapsodist 
journeyed through Ionian state and island, 
we have caught echoes in the great objective 
epos. The day's twilight brought the 
master's perfect song. Then, we know, a 
darkness of shifting shapes settled over 
Hellas till the lyric, a product many-tongued, 
born centuries before but slowly maturing, 
difficult to measure because its miniature 
qualities ever helped to its loss, but as com- 
plete and genuine a racenote as the epic, came 



GROUNDING OF THE DRAMA 255 

in with the new dawn. Voices of the Lesbian 
and other singers sounded throughout the 
Hellenic world stirring anew with art. We 
have seen in the autonomous feeling leaping 
to life out of groups of monarchic mold, that 
in subjective expression the elegy evolved, 
the iambus, the lyric of single thought and 
feeling, and even the song of blended senti- 
ment of the Dorian chorus. 

We have seen in the years following the 
Persian wars that race and religious ardor 
of the Hellenes had intensive stimulation. 
Now great events had spiritualized the old 
faiths in divine power, the practices of the 
people reinvigorated belief in its providence 
towards the race. Then again, before the de- 
light of the people at the repulsion of Asia 
had declined, the inclusion at the beginning of 
Pericles' persuasive career of Athenians in 
the jury systems had told upon Athenian 
character profoundly. The law history testi- 
fies to among other peoples, that a broaden- 
ing of suffrage rights brings a deepening of 
the religious sense to those enfranchised, had 
proved itself in Hellas. 

Every generation craves sensitive re- 
flectors to mirror its own peculiar spirit. 



256 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

The spiritual life of every generation, we say, 
must sink into decadence unless it renews it- 
self in intimate union with cosmic conscious- 
ness and creates afresh expression of its life. 
When preeminence and political liberty had 
come to Athens, the Hellenes stamped their 
genius upon another racial form. Architec- 
ture we have seen combining the two spirit- 
ual phases of the Hellene, the southern and 
northern, blending the two to form a third. 
This synthesis of mind fired also the creative 
impulse of literary art. The serene, joyous 
impulse of the Ionian Greeks, the spirit that 
had luxuriated in recounting the epic, in the 
setting forth the philosopher and physicist 
and historian, and had penetrated the recesses 
of the human heart in elegiac and iambic 
poetry — Ionic grace and mobility, now in 
unity with the stern, ethic god-call and abid- 
ing sense of god-presence of the Doric chorus, 
was giving the world Greek drama. To per- 
fect the evolution had needed many genera- 
tions. Greek tragedy "advanced by slow de- 
grees, ' ' said Aristotle long after. In this age 
of Athens it took perfect form. Man in the 
energy of free action calls for action repre- 
sented. 



GROUNDING OF THE DRAMA 257 

Winter and springtime, then as now, were 
seasons of many worshipfnl festivals — fes- 
tivals in many instances connected with ob- 
lations and rites to Earth for bonntifnl 
fruits, and to Sun, maker of seasons. They 
refer back to primitive peoples, and in many 
instances, as in Greece, were connected with 
the invoking, stimulating, strengthening of 
the spirit of fertility. 

From about the 19th to the 21st of our De- 
cember, song and dance, probably pantomime 
and buffoonery, and also improvised plays by 
wandering players added zest to country 
sports in Attica. These distinguished the 
Country Dionysia. Merry-makings of the 
feast, somewhat like the materiality with 
which we every year celebrate our Christmas, 
may have distorted the initial object of the 
celebration, which was, as we said, to give 
magic potency to the exuberant forces of 
nature then buried, to stimulate growth, to 
strengthen by wanton excess the god of vege- 
tation whose powers were in that season sus- 
pended. Tumultuous processions of mum- 
mers noisily singing, inebriately dancing, 
bearing a symbol of the quickening force of 
nature, called for the god of life. Then the 



258 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

new wine was first tasted, and sustenance in 
cakes and fruit offered. 

To awaken or to strengthen the sleeping 
god, maenads sought still further in the lesser 
feast of the Lenaea, during the last days of 
our January, when, according to an old scho- 
liast, a bearer of a flaming torch held the 
brand aloft and cried to the assembled people, 
" Invoke the god"; and all those present 
shouted "Iacchus, son of Semele, thou giver 
of wealth ! ' ? 

About the first of our March, at the Anthes- 
teria, the feast that causes things to bloom, 
when the wine of the last year was ready to 
drink, each household opened its casks, re- 
ligiously made libations to the god, and 
decked their rooms with early spring flowers. 
Again was the feast of the bringing up of 
creative impulse and growth. Earth, source 
and mother of all, held below its surface dur- 
ing four months of winter a latent, slumber- 
ing divinity, to whom rain-clouds were sacred, 
and fertilizing rain and dew. The people 
must resurrect and stimulate the god that he 
may pour life into the soil "in the holy season 
of spring. ' ' 8 

8 Peoples not Greek celebrated similar processes of 



GROUNDING OF THE DRAMA 259 

The folk massed at a temple in solemn and 
secret services. In other ways emotion 
socialized itself. Choruses competed honor- 
ing the merry young god in song and dance. 
The whole folk reveled and masqueraded, 
parading after a statue of the god, as myth- 
ical followers of Dionysus, as Bacchse, as 
nymphs, and finally retired for banquets. 
Barren winter was dead and teeming life 
abroad in the land. 

This rebirth festival, this joy at the re- 
newal of life, was also one of revocation of 
souls, when in the upward motion of the tide 
of life spirits of the dead significantly rose 
and went about. Their households set out 
pots of food and feasted the souls and poured 
on tombs libations of placation. And be- 
cause it was also a feast of purification they 

nature — for instance, believing the god of fertility slept 
in winter, the Lydians, when the sun brought back the 
spring, danced with enthusiasm; and tribes in the north 
of Europe held the feast of Ostara (Easter), the 
Anglo-Saxon goddess of springing, fertilizing time. To 
our day Christians of the Greek Church in Thrace ob- 
serve fertility rites in their Lenten carnival — men of a 
village masquerading in goatskins, and finally, after 
various doings symbolic, putting on a yoke and praying 
for a good harvest as they drag the plow. 



260 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

put pitch on their doors and practiced other 
rites of aversion of malign influences. At 
this Anthesteria fell the ceremony of the 
mystic marriage of Dionysus with the wife 
of the king archon, a symbolic union of the 
refreshment of the blood of the people and 
the life of the soil, and thus reverently es- 
teemed an assistance to the growth of crops. 

About the first of our April, in the Greater 
Dionysia, the people celebrated the preva- 
lence of summer, and their joy that Dionysus 
had wholly delivered his folk from decay of 
vegetation and the needs and cares of winter. 
Again the earth was putting forth her yield, 
and with the impelling aid of the god of life 
should bear fruitful harvest. 

The idealizing ritual of Dionysus, the great 
vegetative god, had, we have seen, become in 
sentiment and ideas the property of the state, 
and had gradually superimposed itself upon 
the rites of the Olympian gods, especially 
upon the worship of the season-god Apollo, 
and also of the pre-Greek liturgy of Mother 
Earth. It had crystallized after its own na- 
ture the worship of the spirit of fertility in 
other cults. Here again is evident that im- 
pelling genius of the Hellenes to put in poetic 



GROUNDING OF THE DRAMA 261 

and plastic form their spiritual life's intima- 
cies and unities with the world, with the bar- 
renness of winter, the jocund spring, the 
fruition of summer and gifts of the fall of 
the year. 

In Dorian cities so far back as in the time 
of Alcman, we have seen that singers taught 
by a chorus master and dancers trained to 
military precision offered, in behalf of the 
people, thanks to the gods by chanting and 
dancing poems. So malleable, so pliable a 
form was the Dorian choral, whether it were 
a joyous paean to the sun-god Apollo, or a 
dithyrambic ode of enthusiasm to Dionysus, 
that the song and its expressive dance might 
run from gladness and gayety to grave so- 
lemnity. In a member of the chorus imper- 
sonating the god, or telling his perils, and 
the chorus expressing the sympathies of a 
pious mind with the sorrows of Dionysus, 
tragedy may have had its birth. Exactly 
how we know not, perhaps in a dithyrambic 
song of spring when a cyclic chorus dressed 
as satyrs sang and danced goat-songs to the 
god of generation. Or tragedy may have 
grown as is lately claimed, from the Dorian 
usage of honoring heroes with solemn hymns 



262 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

sung round their graves, all referring back to 
a primitive worship of the dead. Whatever 
its origin, it was unmistakably religious and 
embodied racial consciousness. 9 So to unite 
the lyric action of the Doric chorus with the 
Ionic recitative, with the dramatic dialogue 
of the wandering rhapsode, and to bring forth 
tragedy complete, fell to the inspiration of 
these times. The seizure of the Hellenes ' 
spirit with the content and form of tragedy 
became so intense that its evolution affected 
forms of literary composition outside poetry. 
It directed the historians, as we have seen. 
It impelled even oratory when the speech- 
writer prepared his client's address to the 
court, and persisted even to the time when 
Plato cast his speculations in dramatic dia- 
logue. 

This stirring and striving age of Hellas 
brought the drama to perfection, we say, and 
gave dramatic writers a dignity never paral- 
leled before or since. The Hellenes were now 

9 Turning from the Greek a moment, it is curious to 
note that the East Indian drama had its origin in the 
blending of epic and lyric forms, and in religious emo- 
tion, and the Chinese in the union of the arts of dancing 
and singing. 



^SCHYLUS 263 

producing an exalted poetry alive with an 
ethico-philosophic religion, a mental and emo- 
tional education never possessed by any other 
people. In Athens great tragedies appealed 
so thoroughly to the heart of the mass, and 
were so popular a religious service that, since 
the gods delight in the joy of their folk to 
see and hear worshipful functions, an obol 
from the public funds was finally made ready 
for each citizen to buy an entrance ticket. A 
public capable of appreciating and delight- 
ing in the perfection of such plays does not 
now exist, and never has existed except in 
the Athens of the age of their production. 
Spectacles of unendurable misfortune in the 
lives of race heroes effected, in Hellenic esti- 
mation, what Aristotle called catharsis, an 
emotional purification, — and made the citizen 
content to bear his easier mishaps and esteem 
his narrower life felicitous. Through all its 
growth and ripening the tragic play never 
lost its identification with the Hellenes' idea 
of deity, and their faith in the essential unity 
of mankind. 

A man who witnessed the fateful crises of 
the battles of Marathon and Salamis, and 
that a man of profound insight, who had seen 



264 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

his race breaking the omnipotence of the 
ruler of rulers, humbling the world-compel- 
ling army of the great king to the dust — such 
a man would feel in human affairs the venge- 
ance that pursues crime, and his work would 
reflect nemesis — the Nemesis Herodotus set 
forth. iEschylus embodied qualities of this 
generation of the Athenians, their conscious- 
ness of right, of honor and the public virtue 
that was the foundation, after the Persian 
wars, of Athens' glory. Whatever of his 
mighty plays are preserved to us are vivid 
with vast, enlarging and ennobling emotion. 
They declare the boldness of soul nurtured 
by great thoughts. They have the old se- 
verity of devotion to law that Solon taught, 
and regard for race habits and breeding, a 
Dorian, deeply brooding conception of life. 

Uniting with the purified spirit of the times 
they spiritualized the old religion of Zeus and 
gross myths. Dramatic and majestic forms, 
types, abstractions, traditional ideals possess- 
ing the imagination, gleaming in the half- 
light of an elder world, express in super- 
human language wonder, exalted resignation 
and faith in the immanence and direction in 



^SCHYLUS 265 

human life of supreme wisdom and power. 
They partake of the character of the sculp- 
ture — the stable, universal, traditional ideals 
spoken of on foregoing page 237. They em- 
body the primal note of tragedy — mutability 
and reversal of fortune, fate, inscrutable 
power striking at titan and man, at pride, at 
well-calculated plans and bringing all to dust 
— he who pursues power wars with the un- 
conquerable which masters all humans alike. 
In the ' i Prometheus, ' ' a drama which takes 
up with the loftiness of ancient Hebrew 
thought, and intensity of emotion of the old 
Hebrew lyric, the condition and relation of the 
human race, Prometheus helps on the mind 
of man aspiring with ardor to higher planes, 
seeking to gain such perfect knowledge and 
art as the immortals have set aside for them- 
selves. This is defiance of Zeus, a Divine 
Will and harsh, avenging god of justice, and 
the titan, hero-savior, who " loved mortals 
overmuch/' himself perishes amid rolling 
thunder and the lightnings which the high 
god hurls. The sinner's own presumption in 
over-stepping moral order, and his excess 
fling him to ruin. 



266 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

"The blow that fells the sinner is of God, 
And as he wills, the rod 
Of vengeance smiteth sore." 

Like every other Greek tragedy of these 
years, the "Prometheus" action is inner, 
spiritual, effecting the catharsis of Aristotle. 
It makes way for an elevating and assuaging 
tranquillity. It demands man's faith, awe 
and devotion in a divine government and its 
righteousness. Profound ideas inform such 
plays. Truth, loftiness and sublimity inhere 
in them in simple strength and never degen- 
erate. 

Still Sophocles, in fact, centers the poetic 
consciousness of this age. Born thirty years 
after iEschylus and therefore maturing out- 
side those national woes the heart of iEschy- 
lus knew, Sophocles most completely stamped 
his work with that quality of the Hellenes 
called harmony, wise moderation, composure 
and noble resignation. His plays have about 
them the serenity and balance of the Par- 
thenon which grew to its perfection before 
his eyes. 

The vague, shadowy titans of .ZEschylus 
give way in Sophocles' poems to Hellenic 
perspicuity; the characters, less godlike, 



SOPHOCLES 267 

are more human and of Greek precision of 
form. In their ethical ideas, in their concep- 
tion of a supreme sustainer of the moral law 
and order, in setting out the favorite Greek 
theory of the human in relation to the di- 
vine — instability of good fortune and the 
limitation to the will of man; but greater still 
in the message of the unfathomable meaning 
of human life, his plays are of surpass- 
ing splendor. Their Greek atmosphere per- 
sists with amazing potency. To-day we sit 
amazed at their penetrating simplicity, at 
their enlightened piety and the ideal nobility 
of their characters. We seem to see, as an- 
other has said, and to have present in living 
motion before us, the souls of those Athe- 
nians sculptured by Pheidias round the frieze 
of the Parthenon. Like the sculptor, the 
poet declared he "made humans as they 
should be." Sophocles was a master in the 
analysis of the great elemental emotions of 
men, in the working of passion and power in 
the spirit of man. He c l saw life steadily and 
saw it whole. ' ' 

His inimitable art developed at a period 
when masses of Athenians especially, in 
shaded portico and theater, in jury court and 



268 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

the great public assembly, were reflecting 
and speculating and completing mastery of 
their thoughts and their fluid, subtle 
speech. 

From this broad, massive understanding of 
and sympathy with human life grew the 
poet's keen and exquisite power of words and 
his flowing narrative and choral song. The 
universal interest in the human everywhere 
rife in the time of Sophocles, is doubtless the 
source of the grace and sweetness, the ster- 
ling gentleness that distinguish his plays. 
His art was supremely Greek in presenting 
the lasting, the divine characteristics of the 
human being — which should not be marred or 
distorted by lawlessness or suffering. In re- 
ligious lore he picked the spiritual and left 
the grosser. His piety was peculiarly apt in 
presenting the universal significance that lay 
under the outward form of the popular re- 
ligion. "In things that touch upon the 
gods," he said, "it is best to shun unholy 
pride." "Nothing is base to which the gods 
lead us." In the emotional, creative power 
of genius and the intellectual, critical facul- 
ties, Sophocles stood midway between the fel- 
low-citizens of .iEschylus whose beacon was a 



EURIPIDES 269 

race-embedded morality and the lighter age 
that applauded Euripides. 

Sophocles, said Aristotle, represents men 
as they ought to be; Euripides men as they 
are. The noble beauty of Sophocles ' heroes 
and the Hellenic simplicity, harmony and 
delicate adjustment to end of the -poet's 
work changes in the drama of the third great 
tragic poet of Hellas, born when iEschylus 
was forty-five and Sophocles fifteen. Eace 
myth is still the poet's subject, but his heroes 
are particularized into unique individuals, 
and the atmosphere is saturated with man's 
waywardness and the discord and confusion 
of human life. This means a dying-out of the 
ideal of tragedy. 

Euripides, most speculative poet and 
prophet of free thought, is repelled by popu- 
lar forms in portraying the Hellenes' divini- 
ties. To this critical attitude of mind he 
gives varied expression. " These legends of 
spousals and god lording it over another god 
are the minstrels' sorry tales," he sings. 
And again, "If the gods do anything base, 
they are not gods." Yet a profound re- 
ligious feeling he expressed in this prayer of 
Hecuba 's : 



270 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

"0 prop of earth, thou who hast thy seat upon the 

earth, 
Whoever thou mayst be, Zeus, past finding out — whether 

law of nature or mind of man, 
To thee I pray; for through noiseless path dost thou 

with justice lead mortal things." 

And in another form he cries to the 
world -pervading mind: "Thee, self -begotten, 
who in the whirl of the heavens dost 
interweave the nature of all things, about 
whom is light, round whom dusky, spangled- 
bodied night and unnumbered hosts of stars 
continually do dance!" 

The poet no longer held one transported 
to another world, however. Abiding in this 
he turned to humanity for his ideals, and with 
liquid and flexible periods, and the poetizing 
of every-day speech, he would present the 
naked thought and action of humans. Lo- 
quacity and temper for argument that settled 
on the Athenians especially during the second 
half of the Peloponnesian war, one outcome 
of the sophist, Euripides doubtless mirrors in 
his plays. But they also have another as- 
sociate of those years — a democratic sym- 
pathy with subjects of evil economic condi- 
tions, the poor and oppressed, and every- 



COMEDY AND ARISTOPHANES 271 

where and always the Athenian clarity of in- 
tellect. Euripides ' tragedies were a com- 
ponent part of the age of rhetoric and dialec- 
tics now developing, and its mordant ques- 
tionings at large through the people concern- 
ing the old religion and individual and social 
rights. 

Thus building their tragedy ^Ischylus, 
Sophocles and Euripides became organs of 
the Greek consciousness. In the dramatic 
competitions at the two great festivals of 
Dionysus every year, other poets contested 
whose works we do not know, and often those 
to us unknown gained the prize, aided possi- 
bly by a better training and equipment of the 
chorus, over masters we esteem unrivaled. 
According to "The Frogs" of Aristophanes 
popular taste for tragic poetry was so great 
that "striplings composed more than ten 
thousand tragedies and chattered more by a 
stadium than Euripides. . . . paltry little 
grapes, praters, twittering places of spar- 
rows, disgracers of art." 

Greatness of mind that acts in unity with 
ultimate law and beauty tragedy sets out. 
To make the noble more notable art intro- 
duces the mind that perverts order and acts 



272 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

out its own humor, or folly, or deformity, or 
shallowness, or abnormal view of life. 

In its essence comedy is the child of democ- 
racy, the equality of men who flay one an- 
other in jovial merriment. It could not be a 
product of the court of tyrannus or noble, the 
very life of which is preserved by security 
of freedom from ridicule and jest. The 
grounding of its spirit must be a later per- 
fection than tragedy. 

Greek comedy belongs to a country life 
where acquaintance was sure and equality un- 
suspended. A rumor gives its origin to the 
Dorians — because that folk were possessed of 
a rude, individual joviality. Amid such it 
may have evolved, from the license of a har- 
vest feast, some festival of the vintage god 
when revelers indulged in ribald witticism 
and gross ridicule of persons and conditions. 
Swift after the end of a chorus to Bacchus, 
that exuberant god who himself reveling in 
mocking gibe had vouchsafed the choric com- 
pany song and dance, the folk may have 
taken for granted the plain-spoken, unre- 
strained joke. The joke's near kin, ludicrous 
imitation and mock dignity, would soon be 
knocking for entrance as master of the revels. 



COMEDY AND ARISTOPHANES 273 

However, since writers of comedy should 
possess a vantage of deep conception and real 
refinement, and also penetrating vision into 
the abnormalities and basenesses and follies 
of men, the holder of the mocking masque 
might have a bitter seriousness. 

Even when the comic muse of Hellas had 
come to full brilliance in Athens, much of its 
original spirit abode, and arbitrary quizzing 
of the individual still went on. But Attic 
comedy did not confine its activities to reality 
and probability and their laws. Imagination 
of soaring height distinguished it, indulged 
in political as well as trenchant personal sat- 
ire, and personified whatever it pleased and 
how it pleased. 

Aristophanes, chiefest of Athenian comedy 
writers, a poet of rich and felicitous phrase, 
a consummate artist, a conservative antipa- 
thetic to new ideas, hating Socrates ' cease- 
less test and scrutiny, a violent factionary 
against the Athenian democracy and its 
changeful temper, attacked in airy, high- 
wrought fantasies contentions of his age, 
placing them for instance in ' l Cloud-cuckoo- 
town, " and with poignant, grotesque ridicule 
the more popular and conspicuous men, even 



274 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

Socrates and his " thinking-shop, ' ' and also 
the gods and the women of Athens. His 
plays gained an undoubted chief end — they 
entertained and amused coteries of young 
men of Athens. 

If an ideal of the comic muse may be an 
all-in-all drunken distortion of real life, then 
the juggling and license of Aristophanes are 
peaks of perfection. 

The political equality of Athens and the 
ragged, hungry, poor, landless, unemployed 
because of the competition of slave labor, cit- 
izens to whom the equality permitted hope of 
food and life, are his especial butt. Fraud, in 
a democracy open to the light of day, uniting 
with ignorant pretense fought for political 
control. Aristophanes bitterly condemned 
the freedom and equality that gave men 
chance for good as well as for ill. 

In the stress of events comedy was impo- 
tent. Eidicule of rulers, bitter and libelous 
attacks, scornful laughter, became not so 
palatable to the people. The ending of the 
Peloponnesian war in the reduction of Athens 
broke the energy of public life and damped the 
ardor of the comic muse. 



THE SOPHISTS 275 

COMING OF THE SOPHISTS AND THE NEW 
EDUCATION 

Through the centuries marked by a 
burgeoning individualism we have seen the 
speculative mind of Greece employed mainly 
in the order of nature, and looking to man as 
a part of nature. That mind was still youth- 
ful. From the inefficacies and conflicts of the 
philosophers ' conclusions, from hasty gener- 
alizations, doubt arose among men as to 
the righteousness of probing the universe's 
secret. They pronounced in broadspread 
murmurs the old physico-metaphysical in- 
quiries impious, knowledge the gods reserved 
for themselves. 

A new field was, however, opening. Al- 
ready for hundreds of years the Hellenes had 
peered into the conduct of life and had made 
for its government naive, elemental rules. 
The early gnomic poets afforded such laws in 
especial form. Precepts of theirs and prov- 
erbs we have seen long settled into a part 
of the education of Greek youth. Moral 
conceptions of the early philosophers had 
also become a part of the possessions of 
the race. Evolution in ethical thought, the 



276 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

elevating of the social mind and will, goes 
slowly. 

But emotions of an individualizing age, 
poetically feeling and affirming of physical 
appearances and of human rights, were now 
giving way to a virile capacity, to inductive, 
analytic discourse, to profounder thinking, 
weighing, judging, to effort at logical classi- 
fication. The impulses of the time in the 
poetry of the time, the Athenian drama, wit- 
ness the Greek mind engaged in major prob- 
lems of human existence and the inhering and 
ever-present democratic sentiment — in the re- 
lations of the individual as a member of an 
organized society. 

These subjects not only poets and his- 
torians treated — assemblies, gymnasia, the- 
aters, public walks, were alive with dis- 
cussions of human conduct ; what was honor- 
able; what justice; what piety; what base; 
what expedient ; what not ; all growths rooted 
in anterior centuries, now nurtured by de- 
mocracy and fertilized by the sophists and 
other discussers of civic relations. With un- 
precedented development of the genius of 
social order went evolution in reason and re- 
flection, and presented a new conception of 



THE SOPHISTS 277 

the science of human conduct — the old educa- 
tion, old sanctions for conduct, having lost 
force. 

At Athens the progressive, speculative 
spirit had attracted men of new, radical 
ideas. Hand in hand with the city's out- 
blossoming in art and literature, within a few 
years after the battle of Salamis, a class of 
men not before known flourished within her 
public places, itinerant teachers, private pro- 
fessors, " sophists' ' they called themselves, 
who undertook to teach by facile theory, not 
by slow, hard-bought practice as heretofore, 
wisdom and virtue. In other cities than 
Athens, gathering youth about them, they 
spoke in public street and portico, and also at 
the Olympic and other national festivals. In 
their very origin and progress race feeling 
and race pride abounded. They were a by- 
product of the spirit of their age, upon which 
in turn they acted largely. 

Just as minstrels had recited in public 
place the old epic lays, so now sophists clad 
in purple delivered, for a good round price, 
speeches often polished with consummate 
art. They instructed and swayed the under- 
standing of the crowds by their persuasive 



278 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

dialectical conversation. 10 In Athens their 
appeal and influence was often among a newly 
emancipated populace inclined to treat with 
contempt the difficult, ethically ruled educa- 
tion of the past. Magnificent promises and 
flattery to those who paid high fees, preten- 
sions to pass upon all institutions and all 
peoples, marked the ministrations of the 
more superficial of their number. They 
sensed their countrymen's pace and their 
teachings accelerated it. They foreran the 
popular and forensic oratory and the gram- 
marians J science. 

The old, conservative ideal of education, 
god-fearing, law-abiding, national, a puri- 
tanic circumscribing self to every faculty's 
performance of its function, exalting duty to 
the state and its religion, socialistic in 
quality, aristocratic in practice, tending if 
carried to furthest logic to recede from plia- 
bility, — this old ideal in education was now 

10 These itinerant dialecticians, it is interesting to 
note, theologues have claimed to be direct ancestors in 
method of those early church fathers and doctors who 
went about announcing their evangel and using dialectic 
for conversion. They were therefore prototype of the 
sermonizer of to-day. 



THE OLD AND NEW EDUCATION 279 

giving way to a new form, liberal, individual- 
istic in quality, forgetful of the potence of 
righteousness and moral discipline, departing 
from vigorous, systematic exercise, freely ex- 
pending and enjoying self in luxuries, teach- 
ing no real thing existed, contemptuously les- 
sening the influence of old-fashioned prin- 
ciples and of law, discrediting religious rever- 
ence and the gods of the people and bring- 
ing forward a showy reasoning, a flippant, 
shallow cleverness and a purTball acuteness. 
According to new standards the old ideal did 
not produce free and cultivated men. And 
these standards witness that the health, unity 
and glory of their country were coming to be 
no longer the chief wish of its citizens. Aris- 
tophanes, in the year 423, humorously and 
vigorously set the old education against the 
new in his comedy ' ' The Clouds ' ' — in part as 
follows : — 

"Let me tell of the old-fashioned educa- 
tion,' ? said Eight Discourse, "as it prevailed 
when I was flourishing and self-control was 
respected. In the first place a child was not 
allowed to grumble. At that time, in orderly 
fashion, together, through the streets, all the 
boys of the ward had to march, scantily 



280 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

dressed too, even if the snow did come down 
like barley groats, to the master of music. 
Then they learned to rehearse a song without 
compressing their sides — either ' Pallas, 
great stormer of cities/ or 'Afar a shout 
resounding,' putting vim into the melody 
their fathers had handed down. If any one 
of them played the buffoon, or tried any sud- 
den changes such as these now-a-days difficult 
trills of Phrynis, he got a beating for having 
discredited the Muses. . . . Nor at dinner was 
it permitted youth to take the head of the 
radish, nor to snatch anise and parsley from 
their elders, nor to live on fish and thrushes, 
nor to sit with legs crossed. . . . Take cour- 
age, youngster, and choose me as the Better 
Discourse, and you shall learn to hate the 
market-place, and keep away from the bath- 
houses and be ashamed of shameful deeds, 
and blaze up if anyone jeers at you, and rise 
from your seat when your elders approach, 
and never do any rudeness to your parents, 
or any shameful thing whatever which shall 
mar the image of Modest Beverence. . . . 
Then healthy and blooming you will spend 
your time in the gymnasia, not chattering in 



SOCRATES 281 

the market-place, dealing in coarse jokes like 
the young men of this day." 

The ferment of spirit which had given free 
political institutions in Athens had of neces- 
sity, we have said, produced instruction for 
fitting electors to perform citizens ' duties. 
An eloquence, sonorous and melodic effect, 
the value of the persuasive word, the salient 
phrase, had been dear to the Greek heart 
since Homer sang of Achilles trained to be 
"a speaker of words and a doer of deeds." 
It had now come to have highest significance 
— Euripides voiced the Greek feeling, "Per- 
suasion save in speech hath no temple" — for 
to an elector of a democracy it held within 
its possibilities mastership in politics. This 
wish the sophists of the fifth century met and 
embodied in their instructions. 

Man, it is clear, was the root of the Athe-* 
nian philosophy — the reality of human rela- 
tions, human duties, the action of men to- 
wards one another and as units in the state. 
Protagoras of Abdera, a most eminent 
sophist, had said "man is the measure of all 
things"; that is, the fruit of philosophy is 
the good of the individual. Attention was to 



282 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

become reflex and lead to self-understand- 
ing. Socrates turned this into the seeking of 
human well-being founded upon general laws. 
" Learn to know thyself " — what thou art and 
what thy abilities for human use; to study 
man apart from the physical world referring 
in the main to man's relations to his fellows. 

The age of the profoundest of sophists, 
Socrates, was now come, the first age to con- 
ceive of an ethical science distinct and apart, 
its end the art of righteousness and social 
living. Those who knew these matters Soc- 
rates accounted good and honorable. Genu- 
ine knowledge, he thought, constrained to 
practice: the ignorant he assimilated to 
slaves. Eeal knowledge is thus a power, an 
impulsive principle, character. Virtue is 
wisdom ; vice ignorance. No one errs of his 
own free will. " Every one wishes for his 
own good and would gain it if he could." 

A testing, scrutinizing, refutative, negative 
force in speculation, unmasking the plausible, 
the pretentious, the one-sided, the false, had 
already shone forth in the Greek spirit. The 
philosopher Zeno had uttered it. This the 
dialectic X1 process of Socrates now expanded, 

11 Dialectic, as has been said, was but the argumenta- 



SOCRATES 283 

asking frankly in ignorance and doubt as to 
the appositeness of definitions from the cur- 
rent sophists, until the minds of his hearers 
fermented under his subtle irony and warm, 
sunny rationalism. He would enter upon 
men's souls, clear their understanding, and 
convince them that most of their stock defini- 
tions were fallacious, mere names, that lack- 
ing clearness of conception they conceitedly 
thought they had knowledge while in reality 
they had none. 

The total self-reliance and independence of 
Socrates, his conviction of an apostolic 
mission from God, his intellectual power and 
stimulating originality, his critical, subtle 
and humane spirit, made him the colossus of 
all awakeners of dormant mentality. He was 
both magnetic prophet and cool rationalist. 
He sought to define men and things — ideas. 
He would, feeling the danger in Athens of the 
rule of ignorance and of those perverted by 

live, systematized conversation — a logomachy or "word- 
fight" — of a sharp-witted people, conducted with com- 
plaisance, with persuasion, under recognized rules. 
"Whithersoever the argument bears us, just as a wind 
drives the ship, there must we go," said Socrates. The 
method was a ladder in the later Plato's hands for 
ascent towards truth. 



284 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

false standards, make men good through the 
gymnastic of moral effort. .He had toward 
knowledge the enthusiasm, and toward edu- 
cation the optimism, of the true democrat. 

His aim to correct vicious tendencies and 
to strengthen mental infirmities by series of 
questions which brought out common opin- 
ions, impelled thought and led to wholes and 
principles of conduct. "He often made me 
feel," said Alcibiades according to Plato's 
report, "as if the life I am living I could not 
endure to live." Plato called him "the gad- 
fly" of the Athenians. "Of all men I have 
ever known," said the great idealist, "he was 
the wisest and justest and best." No illus- 
tration was too obvious or homely for his 
talk on practical conduct and for educing 
force within his listeners. With whomsoever 
he fell in, he was a fellow-enquirer. 

Socrates' ministrations met the fate as- 
signed those shocking contemporaries with 
new ideas — the death loftiest and indomitable 
altruism is apt to meet when it puts forth 
a claim against the old habit. At his trial he 
reviewed his career before the court. The 
counts against him were of corrupting the 
youth by his teachings and introducing false 



SOCRATES 285 

gods — in obedience lie confessed to an inner 
voice, a divine sign, that since childhood had 
commanded him. "To act thus was laid 
upon me by God, by prophecies, by dreams, 
and in every way by which divine will lays it 
upon man to act," Plato reports him saying. 12 
He had been called to teaching by the god at 
Delphi. His mission was sane and religious. 
"For I go about in order to persuade you 
both young and old, not to care for your 
bodies, nor for money, but especially for the 
soul — how it shall become the best possible ; 
saying that virtue does not spring from 

12 Many Hellenes, and especially Socrates and Plato, 
foreran Christianity in teaching the individualism that 
places our best efforts upon our spiritual life and sets 
aside worldly estimate to approach more nearly a divine 
wisdom and worth. In Socrates' prayer, for instance, 
given at the end of Plato's "Phaedrus" — 

Pan beloved, and other gods 
Who now may be near me, 
Grant that within — in inner life — 

1 beautiful may be; 

Let outward things — whate'er I have 

My inner life set free. 

The wise alone may I deem rich; 

And grant, Pan, to me, 

No more of gold than a moderate man 

May use most easily. 



286 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

possessions but possessions from virtue, and 
so also every other good among men both in 
private and in public life. 13 "I should be a 
doer of guilty deeds, men of Athens, if . . . 
my post at which God stationed me to seek 
wisdom and examine myself and others, I 
should desert through fear of death, or any- 
thing whatever. " "Now, therefore, men of 
Athens, I am far from pleading my own 
cause, as one might think, but I plead for 
your sake, lest in condemning me you sin 
in the matter of God's gift to you. For if 
you slay me, you will not easily find another 
such. . . . Persuaded by Anytus you may 
lightly put me to death ; then pass the rest of 
your lives lying in sleep, if God does not, in 
love to you, send another evangelist. ' ' 

Socrates was one of a class of men (like 
the Hebrew prophets) who give themselves to 
the moral reformation of mankind — moral 
reformation meaning a cleansing, a purify- 

13 Centuries later Jesus, as reported by Matthew (vi, 
33) was to say, "Seek ye first the kingdom of God and 
his righteousness, and all these things shall be added 
unto you." All through its centuries of illumination 
the Hellenic spirit was a prophet bespeaking its historic 
sequel, the ideas of Christianity — ideas which it in scat- 
tered parts enunciated and sent forth into the world. 



PLATO 287 

ing. Such puritanism government, and es- 
pecially democracy, has ever found neces- 
sary. He was, then, a puritan prophet of 
righteousness, whose conviction and earnest- 
ness, says another, brushed aside levitat- 
ing, equivocating artificialities, whose lips 
preached and whose life practiced realities, 
who spoke in words of calm content and con- 
solation when at the approach of death he 
turned eyes to another world, but found his 
chiefest joys in the bonds of human fellow- 
ship in this. 

Onward from the time of Socrates ethics 
was a distinct branch of philosophy. 

Socrates, driving earnestly for whole, uni- 
versal principles, had, seeking what virtue is, 
fixed his thoughts on defining moral sanc- 
tion — what is true. Before him had been 
Parmenides' doctrine of static calm, a birth- 
less, deathless, formless, impalpable Being, 
One. Before him also the fertile mind of 
Heraclitus had, as we have seen, put forth 
the doctrine that all things in the world of 
sense are ever in "flux and there is no know- 
ing about them." 

Under the especial influences of these three 
minds, and also of the Spirit, pneuma, 



288 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

nveufxa^ of Xenophanes, Plato, Socrates ' 
disciple, constructed what commentators have 
called his theory of universals, of ideas — that 
realities corresponding to the definitions are 
other than the objects given in sense, that 
realities are whole thoughts, things-in-them- 
selves, splendid archetypes of the objects of 
sense, eternal and immutable entities, the 
same yesterday, to-day and forever. They 
are the objects of all real knowledge. Just 
as they lend themselves to the individual 
when he thinks, so they are the creators of 
our reason. Knowledge anterior to all ex- 
perience had its source in this world of ideas. 
Plato was born near the beginning of the 
Peloponnesian war and grew to manhood dur- 
ing its conflict. His theory is a knitting to- 
gether by a sovereign intellect of the idealism, 
the old, unconscious and ineradicable tendency 
to poetry, and its sensuous apprehensions, of 
his race — an evolution of his inheritance — 
qualities which his fellow Hellenes had 
worked out in their religion, their civic polity 
and their art. Plato's abstract notions of 
Wisdom, Fortitude, Temperance, Justice, 
were another form the Greek mind took of 
poetically endowing every object with a soul, 



PLATO 289 

a personality, of forming gods as it had 
formed them in its childhood before Homer's 
day. 

His theory is also pervasively human, it 
has been remarked, inasmuch as it expresses 
a tendency of the human mind to bunch to- 
gether qualities of similarity and refer them 
to a type or model. The universe of Ideas 
which the mystic Plato set forth became the 
Logos, the indwelling life and truth of Philo 
and of the Fourth Gospel. 

A soul animates the world, and this world- 
soul is the only begotten, [xovoyevrjt;, imma- 
nent. Supreme Deity is maker of the world- 
soul. After the same model deity fashioned 
the world-body. The cosmos or well-ordered 
universe, becomes thus an organism, " Di- 
vine Child. " 

In creating this world "God was good," 
says Plato, and "in one who is good there 
never is envy: so being far from envy he 
wished that all things become as like himself 
as possible." "He set the soul in the midst 
of the body . . . and set forth a sphere 14 re- 

14 Because the sphere is the most perfect of forms, 
the universe, most perfect of existences, must be 
spherical. 



290 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

volving in a sphere, by reason of its own vir- 
tue powerful over itself, and needing no other, 
but being sufficient to itself for acquaintance 
and friend. ' ' 

The world-soul was the vice-gerent of the 
Creator, like the Logos of Heraclitus spoken 
of on foregoing page 148. The creator was 
the " Father," " Generator,' ' the Highest 
God. ' ' To discover the Maker and Father of 
the Whole is a task, and if once he were dis- 
covered, he could not be spoken to men." 
That is, All-Good and Primordial Principle 
is too remote from the common mind to be ex- 
plained. 

The created gods, receiving from their 
great demiurge the immortal part, fashioned 
man and the perishable part of his soul. In 
every human soul, said Plato, is a divine ele- 
ment of the Supreme God, "the eye of the 
soul." It is the highest and most divine part 
of man, a sovereign daemon who "lifts us 
from earth to our kinship with heaven, since 
we are not of earth but of heaven by birth. ' ' 
Greatest honor is borne the soul by making 
it better, and love of truth, of all excellences 
of character, is first, and love of justice. 
Virtue in and for itself is the highest human 



PLATO 291 

good. " Every soul of man, by its very na- 
ture, has seen the things that really are, other- 
wise it would not have come into this form of 
life. To rise from things here to the recol- 
lection of those is not easy for every soul." 
"Even in life that which makes each one of 
us to be what we are is the soul; and when 
we are dead, the deathless being of us, which 
is called the soul, goes on her way to other 
gods, that to them she may give account." 

As in the old Orphic speculation, bodily 
desires are weights and hindrances to the im- 
prisoned soul of man eager for release. 
Man's life is all a preparation for death. 
Of its future life with the gods the soul has 
had visions in the archetypes. There are 
two other places of the future world — Ach- 
eron, the place of impure souls and Tartarus, 
or Hell. 

The beautiful is that which pertains to ex- 
cellence of soul or body ; the ugly that which 
pertains to defects and vices. This identifies 
aesthetics with ethics, and puts art as a sub- 
server to morality. Because of the suscep- 
tibility of humans to that about them — to the 
influence of environment— from his perfect 
state Plato would banish all art not edifying, 



292 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

not mastering the subject to political pur- 
poses. In common with other disciples of 
Socrates he inherited a puritan asceticism 
and taught a Dorian depreciation of lighter, 
seductive externals. 

The state is but the individual writ large 
— and here we have Plato expressing the 
sympathies of the Pythagorean brotherhood. 
The disorganization of the state from mal- 
formed individualism — the disintegration of 
a state's life which Plato was witnessing at 
Athens — he would heal by subjecting the in- 
dividual to the best interest of all, to corpo- 
rate sentiment. For his perfect state Sparta 
or Lacedaemon, where had persisted a mili- 
tary organization associated with the victory 
of northern invaders, gave Plato the outline 
---here again in the ideal state, as in the archi- 
tecture of the Acropolis and in the religious 
drama, the northern Dorian genius of the 
Hellenes dominating the southern Ionian 
character. Eulers should be filled with ' ' the 
divine love" of "just and judicious action.' ' 
War-men or military are the armed con- 
science and will of the state, and handicrafts- 
men and husbandmen who produce the great, 
supporting base. For this pattern state "an 



PLATO 293 

imitation of the best and most beautiful life," 
Plato laid down rules concerning the "divi- 
sion of powers, " the independence of the 
superior political functions, which descended 
to and influenced the work of our forefather- 
makers of the Constitution of the United 
States. 

Conceptions of a state which prevailed at 
Athens in its marvelous fifty years, that of 
Pericles reported by Thucydides, that of 
^Eschylus and Sophocles, and of Pheidias and 
Ictinus as shown by their works, regard the 
city not only as a dwelling place of safety 
from enemies, but also as a medium through 
which may be practiced refined ideals of life 
— not for the sake of life, but for the sake, 
said a pupil of Plato, of the noble life. This 
pupil, Aristotle, who at a time when the Greek 
city-state was perishing compactly organized 
the scattered material of existing constitu- 
tions of one hundred and fifty-eight Greek 
cities, became the founder of comparative po- 
litical science. ' * Man is by nature a citizen, ' ' 
said this theorizer of the realities the Greek 
cities had lived. A citizen he defined by the 
right to make laws and administer justice. 
The state is a natural institution necessary 



294 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

first from the needs of man, and second that 
he may live his best, complete life. It is an 
organism, each part of which is fitted for its 
function. It seeks the common good of all 
by building character and intellect, by the 
exercise of human personality. Formed to 
make life secure, said Aristotle, the state 
continues that men may five the highest ac- 
tivities, both civic and super-civic or divine. 
All education is but preparation for some 
worthy activity. The ideal state educates its 
people for its institutions. Only in this way 
can its institutions be preserved. 

Upon what is Plato's greatness grounded? 
Answers have been many, not including, in 
summaries, a literary art that is an unvarying 
marvel. Upon his all-illuminative sugges- 
tiveness ; upon his vitality that meets with an 
interpretation the spiritual phase of gener- 
ations since his day — even of to-day; upon 
the fact that his mysticism, his illuminism has 
not been at war with the scientific spirit, but, 
says a disciple, has rather saved it from 
aridity and worship of word and form. In 
warming, softening and lighting Plato has the 
all-inclusiveness of the Teacher of Christian- 
ity. 



PINNACLES OF THE GREEK ASCENT 295 

The Socratic solution of life is that life 
should be an energizing, an ardent enquiry, an 
unswerving seeking for the eternal Good 
and Beautiful and True — ever a seeking and 
a beholding, never a satisfied possession. 
The solution celebrates the maturity of man. 
The deeper we see the more conscious we 
are of a great deficiency. We must nurse no 
illusion. Only seek and fear not. "It is 
wrong to do injustice in return for injustice, 
or to inflict ill on any man, whatever we may 
suffer at his hands," said Socrates a month 
before he drank the poison to which he was 
sentenced at his trial. In time we shall have 
forgotten self in the presence of the blazing 
universe of God. When self is forgotten the 
end is attained. 

In Socrates and Plato we have come to the 
pinnacle of the Greek ascent. The energy of 
the genius of Hellas is great enough to over- 
come the hostility of nature and fate. Its 
pronunciamento is: — Mediation between the 
soul and its external world is in a wise and 
strong self -limitation. Aidos, aidcoc, reverent 
fear had now become sophrosyne, (raxppoauuy, 
temperate self-restraint based on reverence, 
health of soul, soundness of intellect, 



296 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

sense of one's own worth. Like aidos, re- 
plete with religions feeling, dominating 
earlier peoples, sophrosyne subjugated ex- 
uberance, guarded against excess and made 
for moderation, self-control. 

To measure the height attained by the 
genius of this third great epoch of the Hel- 
lenes is impossible. The same marvelous 
perfection we see everywhere in its works. 
It was mother of the completed idea of civil 
liberty, bearing witness in its output that 
democracy need not welter in commonness 
but may in its polity do the mightiest of 
deeds and with its thought set out the might- 
iest of works — this age of Pheidias in sculp- 
ture, of ^Eschylus and Sophocles and Eurip- 
ides and Aristophanes in poetry, and of Soc- 
rates in ethics, in the conduct of life. The 
depth of its thought and art are unfathomable, 
living with the waters of the eternal spirit. 
We may exhaust all clear, calm and luminous 
images and not overpraise its majesty and 
splendor. 

A consciousness of the meaning and po- 
tence of their work to later nations, and for 
generations to come, must have been alive 
among those Hellenes and urging them to ac- 



PINNACLE OF THE GREEK ASCENT 297 

complish the impossible. The lucid and per- 
suasive speech of Pericles quoted on forego- 
ing page 15, the reasons Herodotus gave 
for his writing, on foregoing pages 250 and 
251, Thucydides in his history, bring us evi- 
dence of their feeling for the future and their 
heirs. They were infused with a conquering 
activity. They had the penetrative percep- 
tion and power, the energy they said was di- 
vine — that not only engenders the idea that 
leads to action, but makes the thought itself 
all-conquering, — that quality called damon- 
isch : 

"Je mehr du fiihlst ein Mensch zu sein 
Desto ahnlicher bist du den Gottern." 



DECADENCE OF THE GREEK 
SPIRIT 



Die Gesundheit und Daur eines Staats beruhet nicht 
auf dem Punkt seiner hoc'hsten Cultur sondern auf 
einem weisen oder gliicklichen Gleichgewicht seiner 
lebenclig-wirkenden Krafte. . . . 

Aber das haben alle Gattungen niensehlicher Auf- 
klarung gemein, dass jede zu einem Punkt der Vollkom- 
menheit strebet, der, wenn er dureh einen Zusammenhang 
gliicklicker Umstande hier oder dort erreicht ist, sich 
weder ewig erhalten noch auf der Stelle wiederkommen 
kann, sondern eine abnehmende Beihe anfangt. — Her- 
der, in Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Mensch- 
heit. 

As societies consolidate they pass through a pro- 
found intellectual change. Energy ceases to find vent 
through the imagination, and takes the form of capital; 
hence as civilizations advance the imaginative tempera- 
ment tends to disappear, while the economic instinct is 
fostered, and thus substantially new varieties of men 
come to possess the world. — Brooks Adams, in The Law 
of Civilization and Decay. 



300 



DECADENCE OF THE GREEK 
SPIRIT 

CAUSES OF DETERIORATION 

Measuked in the great processes of time 
the age of perfect ideals in Hellas, and the 
concrete embodying of its ideals, is as mo- 
mentary as it is sublime. Still beautiful and 
affluent the spirit of Greece declined. Equilib- 
rium of powers, the golden mean of avoid- 
ance of extremes, the harmony of aptitudes 
which rests upon the predominance of the 
highest and subordination of the lower- 
delicacy of the senses and susceptibility to 
impression that had led to the Hellene's sense 
of limitation, to his abhorrence of excess ; 
feeling of the balanced use of all he perceived 
whether in his art or in his life, his lucid, 
vivid singleness in working means to ends — 
fell away. After the depleting war between 
Athens and Sparta there was little balance 
between the soul and body of Hellas. The 
fundamental relations upon which her spirit 

301 



302 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

had advanced for perhaps a thousand years, 
she had lost. A cleavage between the thinker 
and people had come; thought was now be- 
coming the possession of the solitary, holding 
little active relation to social and political 
life. The constructive vigor of Hellas seemed 
near its end. 

What led to the decadence? 

Mere reaction, suggests one: The ideal 
was too high for the average citizen to make 
a reality. No life could maintain such a 
height. Its competition, its very intensity, 
must in time react, in politics to division and 
disintegration from factional strife ; in art to 
softness and enervation. The decay of Greek 
civilization was due to a weakening of the 
moral fiber of the Greek people. 

Exhausting the blood of the nation by ex- 
tinction of the strongest in spirit and body, 
the best, in interminable, inter.-city strife, 
especially in the Peloponnesian war, says a 
second, — just as the progressive energy of 
nations' blood has been depleted in many an- 
other time in later history ; as in the death of 
strong men of imperial Eome in her extensive 
wars, in the sweeping away of strong men of 
England in Mars ton Moor and Naseby, when 



WHY THE SPIRIT DECLINED 303 

men of Scotland, "the Flowers of the Forest, 
were a'wede away" at Flodden, in the death 
of strong men of America at Bunker Hill and 
Saratoga. 

Physical forces of the Hellenes may have 
been insidiously sapped, a third avers : Ma- 
laria becoming endemic about four hundred 
years before Christ, destroyed initiative force 
and disintegrated the energy of the people, 
in such ways as the disease has devitalized 
races to-day. There is proof that during the 
Peloponnesian war, after the plague, Athens 
suffered a considerable languor and indeter- 
mination and unwillingness to make effort to 
gain back her losses. Exuberant strength 
she showed at times later, but it was inter- 
mittent. Malaria, slowly inrooting, might 
have led to modifications, to invisible changes 
of the ideas of the people that occurred in the 
last quarter of the fifth century. 

Again, says another, simplest economics 
may have affected conditions — deficiency of 
the home food supply. The population of 
Athens had expanded, and imports must have 
grown increasingly difficult during the Pelo- 
ponnesian war and afterwards. Abnormal 
economic conditions doubtless had had much 



304 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

to do with the political unrest. Able-bodied 
slaves competed in manufacture with the 
landless, poorer citizen. Property and its 
possession underlay a notable part of the 
political antagonism of Hellas. 

Weight of numbers had at last a victory in 
the decay of Hellas. Compared with the 
hordes about them the Hellenes, we have said, 
were a handful. They had always been fight- 
ing against odds. Their wonderful work in 
politics, in ethics, in physical science and 
philosophy, in poetry and prose, in architec- 
ture and tectonic arts they had done with 
subversion as a possibility ever threatening. 
They had swept the disintegrator back when 
he came in military floods. They had unified, 
assimilated, absorbed, foreign elements and 
influences to an amazing degree. The name 
of Hellas had gone afar. Hellas was the 
light, the glory of beauty and freedom, to 
which the oppressed and maimed of other 
lands, and also the adventurers and traders 
of other lands, had turned. Foreign men 
poured in. Foreign ideas, foreign habits, 
overrode the earnest, poised life of the earlier 
generations. The incomers lessened the peo- 
ple's regard for ancestral custom, for race 



WHY THE SPIRIT DECLINED 305 

law and race legend, and, strongest sanction 
to race stability, race religion and fertility. 
Eace persistence declined. 

Hellenism fell at last before numbers, an 
inert and superstition-fed mind, and before 
individualism developing itself awry, inca- 
pable of unity and of its trusteeship Pericles 
had bespoken. The Greeks' frugal, modest 
self-reliance, their power of doing without, 
gave way to a form of individualism that de- 
feated itself in profligate luxury and windy 
education. In place of an ardent public 
spirit there grew indifference and stagnation. 
The social mind had ceased to idealize liberty, 
and to worship it and strive for its perpetu- 
ation. It had become estranged from itself. 
Loyalty to and reverence for the historic past 
fell away, and also devotion to state which 
had made their heritage sacred, a gift worth 
passing on. 

Patriotism, especially among the prosper- 
ous and corrupt, gave place to a cosmopolitan- 
ism and an economic existence so poor as to 
proclaim devotion to self its sole end. Per- 
sonal ambition, narrow aims, culture, sup- 
planted the ardor of heroic deeds, great 
causes, and made preferable life in personal 



306 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

ease and luxury. The individual settled into 
pursuit of what his short-sightedness deemed 
his own separate interests. It was a day of 
the ascendency of the self-seeking type of 
man. The high altruism that distinguished 
Greece in the Persian wars had reacted to 
egotism. False individualism had developed 
to a loss of public spirit. The far-sighted 
sense of the unity of individual and state 
that had glorified the citizen in the earlier 
city-state was now darkened by a supposed 
antagonism between the interests of the indi- 
vidual and of the state. Certain Hellenes 
seized opportunity for wealth and power and 
destroyed the balance of a democracy — at 
Athens was "contention to rule," said Plato, 
competition for offices and honors. The 
weaker could not withstand the force of the 
interested strong. In larger laws of biology 
even states suffer senile decay. 

A saying of Plato that a change of mode 
of music indicates change in the laws is quoted 
on foregoing page 198. The rule fits other 
arts also. Into the drama Euripides had in* 
troduced clean, sharp individualization. And 
in sculpture the worker was, in these years, 
not embodying national or state ideals, char- 



WHY THE SPIRIT DECLINED 307 

acter, moral sentiment, the ethos of Aristotle. 
Bather, as Praxiteles in carving the sensuous 
beauty of Aphrodite, he was portraying, and 
with more individuality in technic and more 
human feeling and character, divinities whose 
gifts were for the enjoyment of the individual 
citizen. 

Even the unifying religious cults, which 
socialized the individual soul repledging it 
to the soul of the people — these lost their 
hold. Supernatural intervention of supreme 
powers in the affairs of men was a part of the 
creed of every Hellene. After the disasters 
of the Peloponnesian war, gods who had per* 
mitted destruction of the political leadership 
of Athens received scantier courtesies. Be* 
ligion, as we now intimated, had in many 
functions been devotion to the city-state em- 
bodying or projecting the united conscious- 
ness of the people. Private forms of wor- 
ship, rinding in the happiness of another life 
consolations for sufferings in this, in these 
times grew apace. That toleration, that 
liberality of the democratic sentiment at 
Athens which permitted all discourse and in- 
tellectual disquisition, that respect for the 
individual 's dissent in opinion and manner to 



308 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

which Pericles refers in his speech on fore- 
going page 225 — which had allowed the blame- 
less quest of Socrates and his dwelling on 
special promptings from his divine voice — 
right of free speech, love of fullest liberty, the 
freedom from restraint that had permitted 
the spirit to go unnumbered ways in the wan- 
derings of thought, in political aspiration, in 
religious fathomings, in philosophical spec- 
ulation, in analyses of the moral aspects of 
man — lent unchallenged opportunity to de- 
moralizing incomers. 

Thucydides and Euripides and others of 
the day had voiced a blighting skepticism in 
respect to the gods, and miracles, and " proph- 
ecies and oracles and the like which ruin 
men by the hopes they inspire in them." 
They had carried disbelief further than it had 
gone in the sayings of credulous Herodotus 
and his generation. The funeral oration of 
Pericles, pronounced in the year 431 and re- 
ported by Thucydides, has, it is noted, no al- 
lusion to popular religious myths, although 
it glows with the amethystine light of a 
people 's grief. Their religion, originally a 
living thing, had hardened to a mass of for- 
mulas and ceremonies made impressive by 



WHY THE SPIRIT DECLINED 309 

riches of the state and by association with 
the race's art. A ritnal expressing feeling of 
foregone generations deadened warming and 
buoyant intimacy with emotions of their day. 
The people turned elsewhere, to other associ- 
ations, for exercise of their religious con- 
sciousness. 

Emotion defeated reason. Their old-time 
faith — that a lucid, strong intelligence, self- 
reliant, sustained by energy and directness 
of vision is master of all circumstances — had 
gone. Their rationalism had fallen, and at 
times before insidious, infiltering currents of 
faiths that nullified the basal principles and 
facts of Greek life, and before miasmatic 
superstitions which masses of slaves and trad- 
ing foreigners seized as they poured into Hel- 
las, or perchance brought with them. Greece 
had labored to educate a corrupt world and 
was herself led to corrupt the ideals she 
sought to universalize. 

Worship of the gods, we have seen, had 
been an ancestral usage. The gods incar- 
nated race feeling and race thinking. Men 
and women who united in worship showed 
their loyalty to their race and to their state 
which sanctioned and set forth the liturgy. 



310 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

Not to join in the ritual meant disloyalty to 
state and race. Their worship asserted their 
common inheritance and oneness. When the 
worship lost hold on the people their sense of 
oneness in blood lessened. But long after 
faith in their religious values died, festivals 
instituted by the state held the attention of 
the populace by the splendor of their cere- 
monies, their poetical imagery, the beauty of 
their ritual in form and color, and by associ- 
ation with the Hellenic race-traditions and 
the music of the Hellenic speech. The Athe- 
nians, we have said, were ever markedly given 
to religious cults. Even when Paul spoke on 
the Areopagus centuries after their national- 
ism had gone, he told the generation of his 
day that he saw they were a very god-fearing 
folk, a>£ detoidacnov ears poos 6jud<; Oecopco. 1 

1 More than a hundred years after Paul, Pausanias 
wrote of an altar to Mercy in the market place of 
Athens — "to whom, although of all gods he is the most 
helpful in human life and in the mutations of fortune, 
the Athenians are the only Hellenes who pay honor." 
"They are more pious than other . folks," the old Greek 
traveler continues, "for they have an altar to Reverent 
Fear, and to Rumor, and to Impulse. It is clear that 
to those who are more pious than others there will be a 
proportionate share of good fortune." 



WHY THE SPIRIT DECLINED 311 

Attendance at and glorying in the national 
games and, at Delphi and Olympia, devotion 
to the divinities of the shrines, had been, we 
have seen, a general expression of the Hel- 
lenes' national unity. But even the pan- 
Hellenic festivals which had had so great a 
share of the Greeks' spontaneity in thought 
and joy in action, and had once fairly voiced 
the profounder spirit of Greek religion and 
Greek politics, passed from the ideal of phys- 
ical strength united with grace in friendly 
competition. No longer did balanced bodily 
excellence and vigor, refined by love of beauty 
of form and religious feeling, bespeak na- 
tional life. Now athletes were classmen, mon- 
strously developed by exercise, set apart, 
over-specialized. The games were coming to 
be commercialized athletic shows, where hu- 
man beings, over-developed to the degree of 
a mechanical instrument, made sport an end 
in itself and trafficked for victory — where, as 
popular heroes, they exhibited their tempo- 
rary strength to under-developed, unath- 
letic applauders filling the seats of an amphi- 
theater, spectators themselves indisposed to 
effort. 

With the Greeks, as with a sometime later 



312 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

nation, the very core of its formative energy 
was a religiosity, that exalted power of the 
puritan in an other-worldliness which expands 
his democracy in this life — the strength of 
the worshiper who is a priest as well as 
child of his divinity. Sacerdotalism eats out 
the heart of a democracy. "When a priest 
caste grew, even in so indefinite lines as in 
later Hellas, when authority sought to sup- 
port itself and credulous practices flourished 
among the people, a weakening of the indi- 
vidual set in. That in his old age, writing 
his "Laws," Plato inveighs with all his elo- 
quence against infidelities, the heresy of dis- 
belief in the Greek gods, in their providence 
and care, in their incorruptibility, doubtless 
brings us light upon actual conditions before 
his eyes. The foundations of the later Hel- 
lenes' religion were the ideas and sensibilities 
of their ancestors. Eace associations had 
built upon them, and when they were broken 
or displaced nothing of inherent religious 
value took their place. 

The last stages of the Greek spirit are now 
clear, and also the pathos of its fall. Sub- 
version of the power of Athens at the end 
of the Peloponnesian war left the world of 



WHY THE SPIRIT DECLINED 313 

Hellas incapable of thrusting back inraiders. 
Disintegration of her spiritual and self-re- 
liant strength opened the way for any well- 
knit, crafty and ambitious foreigner to pos- 
sess himself of her people. "The man of 
Macedon," Philip, answered the call and 
fitted the occasion. Among the Hellenes, 
sycophants, that is manufacturers of false 
and frivolous indictments, demagogues pre- 
tending to represent the people but in reality 
self-seekers, and foreign adventurers, out- 
balanced the patriots. The people armed for 
their country's defense and met death in bat- 
tle, says their epitaph composed by Demos- 
thenes, that the Hellenes might not bear the 
hateful yoke of slavery. 

The progression of the Greek spirit ends 
wholly with the establishment of Macedonian 
supremacy in 338 before Christ. Liberty 
fled in the last mutterings of Demosthenes ' 
thunder against the barter with Philip of 
Macedon. The Greek mind stifled under dic- 
tation from Pella. Its creative activity 
ceased. "Far-seeing Zeus," said the peo- 
ple's ancient Homer, "takes away half the 
virtue of a man the day when slavery closes 
down upon him. ' ' 



314 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

There succeeded a nation of slaves in civic 
life and savans. To lavish money upon per- 
sonal enjoyment Greeks of the great ages had 
esteemed vulgar, inhuman, un-Hellenic. To 
see in the luxury of private life a. compensa- 
tion for the loss of political freedom they had 
judged the choice of slaves. But in Hellas 
this now happened. Demosthenes, and other 
orators, tell of the show and extravagance of 
the self-seeking men of their day compared 
with the simple living of the Athenians who 
had built Athens with a magnificence and 
splendor no future time could surpass. The 
moral basis of the national greatness had 
fallen away. More than half a century after 
the victory at Charonaea various of the cities 
of Hellas recovered independence and formed 
a loose federation — each city exercising the 
old Greek autonomy in its social and peculiar 
affairs, but a federated or common govern- 
ment for purposes touching their nationalism. 
The life of the league was brief. 

A virile, unconquerable people enlightened 
with a social quality, a world-loyalty, never 
before embodied, prepossessed with the quest 
of the ethical values of life, aflame with the 
invisible spiritual energy of a religious en- 



WHY THE SPIRIT DECLINED 315 

thusiasm, zealous with an ardor to system- 
atize knowledge, gifted with a mental supple- 
ness and penetration into all problems, of 
unparalleled art impulse, idealists, doers of 
deeds and thinkers of great thoughts fell be- 
fore irrationalism even to destructive eco- 
nomics in their state, and an unnaturalism 
that forgot essential race conceptions in their 
church, before mere subtleties and a sophis- 
tical making the worse the better reason. 
There came a man who did "plough with a 
silver ploughshare. ' ' Abroad in the land 
was the siren-song of self-indulgence and the 
luxury lightness yearns for. 

Doric puritanism and its race traditions 
and resolute bravery no longer cleaned Hel- 
lenic air. In place of spiritual height deeply 
rooted in race ethics, instead of an ancient 
simplicity and solidity there was an ever-in- 
creasing frivolity, reacting egotism and pleas- 
ures. Possibly we may say the Hellenes 
were victims of their own versatility. That 
is, their progressive energy, the strength of 
their creative and inventive faculties may so 
far have overpowered force of tradition that 
they no longer preserved this second conserv- 
ative force in active civilization. Their culti- 



316 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

vation and its vast creative power had lost 
balance. 

Their disintegration, as we have said, was 
helped by tendencies of disparate and unre- 
lated stocks of the population, and perhaps 
by the old, fluid, solvent, .ZEgean peopled 
blood that could have little intellectual com- 
prehension of and emotional sympathy with 
the organization and administration with 
which their old-time, conquering, northern 
Achaeans, energetic idealists, men of action, 
were instinct, — by means of which organi- 
zation alone the Hellenic states could have 
strength to endure. 

Those peoples coming from the north, 
whom Homer had sung as Achaeans, whose 
greatest inroad we know as Dorian, had pos- 
sibly spent themselves. Amalgamated with 
the multitudes of the milder ^Egean folk 
whom they had originally subdued, to whose 
civilization they had given order and force 
and breadth, whose art impulse the stimulus 
of their energy in other fields of human action 
had impelled to output, — these may have 
been finally overcome by the larger stream of 
blood. Indolence, fondness for pleasure, ac- 
quiescence in whatever power constituted it- 



WHY THE SPIRIT DECLINED 317 

self master, may have been evidence of a 
subjugated race's complete conquest of its 
old-time victor. 

That the spirit of a people is moral, vigor- 
ous, virtuous, while it is absorbed in realizing 
itself, in giving to its purposes objective ex- 
istence, is almost a truism. When it accom- 
plishes the end of its generic, spiritual life, 
it ceases its activities and passes from ma- 
turity to age, unless it originates or takes on 
a new purpose and so a new spirit. The Hel- 
lenes had ceased to win their own spiritual 
life and carry it further. "The gods bring 
to pass much that is beyond all hope," sings 
Euripides, "and the expected does not hap- 
pen. But God has discovered a way for 
the unexpected. So did this matter turn 
out." 

For events in history seemingly more un- 
fortunate for our human kind than the over- 
whelming of the Greek life and the spirit 
impelling it, we must turn to the quenching, 
amid the chaos of peoples that marked the 
patristic age, of the moral impulses of early 
Christianity — when, says a late writer, the 
ethical enthusiasm, the insight into human 
needs of its Teacher were subordinated to a 



318 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

system of doctrines generated in decadent 
Greek dialectics, misty oriental symbolism, 
metaphysical myths and Jewish dogmas. 

But even now, after her subversion, through 
what she had already accomplished, Greece 
entered upon another work of human con- 
sciousness. Dying she lived for the world; 
it " is not quickened except it die. ' ' In giving 
up her exclusiveness and nationality she en- 
tered more immediately upon a broader in- 
fluence^ — the evangelizing all sequent cen- 
turies. Her radiant spirit had put forth a 
perfect blossom. Asiatic and Italian myr- 
iads were now, and in centuries to come, to 
bear its seed to all lands. Great fusion of 
peoples resulted from the leadership of Philip 
and Alexander of Macedon, and soon after 
Alexander's troublous day it was hard to 
draw the line between Greek and barbarian. 
Greek art was now become fit for art 's small 
talk; Greek literature widespread, but im- 
itative, precise, learned ; Greek philosophy at 
times morosely factional and distorted, but 
still seminal. 

Isocrates had said that the Hellenes ' lan- 
guage was a matter no longer of race but 
intelligence. Already the speech bearing its 



AN EVANGEL TO SEQUENT CENTURIES 319 

precious treasure had so made its way that 
the stranger, aping the child of light, might 
gain or externally assume an Hellenic intel- 
lectual view-point. The oriental translated 
his name into Greek — just as at a later day 
he translated it into Greco-Latin, and as he 
often translates it into English to-day. Dur- 
ing the next centuries, upon each new con- 
queror, the spirit of Greece seized hold till 
the whole Eoman world became Hellenized; 
until in Constantinople Roman imperialism 
itself sought to gain its strength in a Greek 
foundation. 

The free-playing life of the people out of 
which Greek oratory and Greek dialectics and 
love of discussion had grown, had passed 
away. But power of speech and of culti- 
vated expression still abode. Studies of, and 
acquaintance with, the ideas and literature 
of earlier Greek times now came to fulfill the 
ideal of education — that from which our ideal 
of education to-day has by direct event and 
tradition descended. Socrates, Plato and 
Aristotle had developed a complete philos- 
ophy of education, which passed from Greece 
south to Africa, and westward where the 
Romans adopted it and fitted it to their needs. 



320 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

From them the philosophy spread to Teutonic 
and Celtic populations of the north. The 
Eenaissance revived and expanded the ideal 
and passed it on, till we find in treatises of our 
English Milton and Locke and other writers 
principles set forth by the works of Xeno- 
phon, Plato and Aristotle. 



CHARACTERISTICS COMMON TO HELLENES 
AND AMERICANS 

The spirit that animated the Hellenes is 
unique. We do not find its repetition. All 
parallels are imperfect. Of late years Japan 
has at times faintly suggested the Hellenic 
feeling towards race unity, and in its rapidity 
of development the all-assimilative, eager, 
adaption of ideas of the Greeks. Also in the 
ethics of Bushido the Hellenic sense of self- 
limitation; and in art a plasticity of concep- 
tion and expression. In Japan, too, we have 
modern likeness to the old Greek solidarity 
of the group. But in its repression of indi- 
vidualism Japan is distinctly non-Hellenic. 
The world is grown large. What moderns 
strive to achieve is unwieldy. Our outwork- 
ings have not proportion and grace. Nor 



CERTAIN LIKENESSES 321 

have they, save rarely, the consciousness of 
God-given mission, as with the old Hellenes. 

"Eternal Youths of History'' the Greeks 
have variously been called. In one of his 
latest works, "TimaBus," Plato makes an 
Egyptian priest say to Solon, "You Hellenes 
are never anything but children . . . you are 
all young; there is no opinion handed down 
among you by ancient tradition, nor any sci- 
ence hoary with age." "Children!" ex- 
claims Europe at the naive individualism of 
our fellow country-men and women, and 
their unproclaimed lack of background and 
race-tradition. 

To those old Hellenes Americans have a 
certain likeness. They are not wholly for- 
eign, wholly strange. Similarities of each 
people the Dean of Greek Letters in Amer- 
ica has named along lines similar to these : — 
Buoyancy and elasticity of spirits, quick per- 
ception, straightness and keenness of vision, 
directness of action, energy, audacity, inven- 
tiveness, a versatile many sidedness, mobility, 
universality. Another quality of the Hellenic 
temperament an English scholar has dwelt 
upon — a natural expansiveness, a wish to 
enter into kindly relations with those one 



322 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

meets, to exchange, one might say, a pleasant 
word with the stranger in a forest roadway, 
to utter a fleeting emotion or thought to 
chance passers-by. That human touch also 
is like the Americans ' — doubtless in each 
people founded on the colonists' environ- 
ment, a singleness of purpose and sim- 
plicity of life that must be with the pioneer, 
a subordination of the complex and organized 
which Americans have to this time success- 
fully kept. 

The Hellenes lived their life, somebody has 
said, much as we Americans should have 
lived it. A puritan-blooded American from 
Kansas City or Minneapolis, walking through 
the Pirseus of the fourth century before 
Christ, and onward to and in Athens, would, 
if the high-pitched idealism of the man could 
speak from his tailored body, doubtless be 
hailed as a possible Hellene from the shadows 
of iEtna, or from some northern town. In 
the instincts of his soul, whether American 
or Hellene, the world is fresh. All is new, 
all is plastic. There is no exhaustion, no 
world-weariness. No sentimental melan- 
cholia, no hazy inanities and faded sestheti- 
cism. He joys in a mental dexterity, a gift 



CERTAIN LIKENESSES 323 

of bringing to one supreme effort all energies 
of body and will, putting heart and soul into 
whatever task be may for the time essay, 
ready appliance of tbe Opportunity that the 
altar in the Olympia stadium prompted. A 
characteristic of his is what Thucydides said 
belonged to the Athenians — to get through 
the matters they have undertaken is their 
holiday, and nothing to do is as disagreeable 
as wearisome occupation. 

The old Hellenes had not only the pe- 
culiar endowments of their race, but an added 
characteristic distinguished them — namely, a 
more nervous energy. So Americans, to-day. 
They had the predilection of youth for ad- 
venture, for change associated with risk, that 
derring-do, that courage and endurance that 
lights the countenance of eternal youth. 
Then, too, the love of being first, an appetite 
for success, "always to be best and excel- 
ling others,' ' said Homer, was a fertile Hel- 
lenic characteristic. "Contention (competi- 
tion) stirs a man to work even though he be 
inactive," sang Hesiod. "For any one in 
lack of work, when he sees another, a rich 
man, he speeds himself to plough, and to plant 
and manage well his house; neighbor vies 



324 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

with neighbor who is hastening to wealth. 
Good is this contention. Potter grudges pot- 
ter, and craftsman, craftsman ; and beggar is 
jealous of beggar and poet of poet." This 
quality grows with what it feeds upon, but 
remains insatiable. To it we may ascribe 
somewhat of the excelling greatness of the 
Hellenes, and in some measure their unhappy 
fall. 

In all democracies, it has been noted, open, 
noisy applause expressing public gratitude 
for service to fellow-citizens is generally es- 
teemed the desirable of honors. No other 
manifestation of deference and admiration 
seems so highly prized. The more impres- 
sible the people of the democracy, the in- 
tenser the sentiment, the louder the applause. 
The greater also the liability of the acclaimed 
to a demoralized self-estimation, to subver- 
sion of judgment and to ultimate corruption. 

To their political leaders the Hellenic de- 
mocracies gave profuse rewards of material 
substance. The Greek character was quick, 
frank, sympathetic, impressible. Accept- 
ance of the gift witnessed consciousness in 
the men that they, too, rated at a price their 
patriotism. But when a leader as poised as 



CERTAIN LIKENESSES 325 

Pericles had gained firm hold on the people, 
or as later, Demosthenes, such men used their 
power honorably. 

Another present-day psychological inter- 
est also pertained among this sensitive peo- 
ple. The Greeks were given to see the im- 
portance in action, and in public affairs, of 
what they called pheme, frfffl, Eumor, a god- 
dess of mysterious origin who impels men, 
they imaginatively said, a subtle force for 
which our English has no name, or at best 
a misrepresenting one — the force that makes 
the collective mind, the primitive habit of 
thinking in group unity, the gregarious sym- 
pathy, which, contagious, quick to act on sug- 
gestion, forgetful of self, forgetful also of 
calm reason, sometimes lacking higher moral 
qualities, by the crude collective mentation 
or emotion of group life submerges individ- 
ual will and forms at a crisis the common, 
spontaneous impulse of a multitude, an all 
dominating social will. They recognized the 
mysterious unit in the days of Homer. In 
greatly enlarged phases this vox dei became 
the vox populi of the inspiration after Ther- 
mopylae, and drove to the upbuilding of 
Athens. In that city stood an altar to 



326 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

Kumor. The city's jury courts, accustom- 
ing the people to seek and balance opposing 
views, the habit of public speaking and teach- 
ing of rhetor and sophist, led to the weight 
of different judgments neutralizing con- 
tagion. To this emotional mind of the crowd 
the Hellenes were exceedingly susceptible. 
So also are Americans. 

There is no alchemy by which we can trans- 
mute the rich and vivid life of that elder peo- 
ple to our view. And we can not objectively 
see ourselves. It is only when we and our 
social accomplishments for human life have 
at last receded into past history that we can 
be viewed in large perspective, without any 
megalomaniac estimate of our own, or any 
micrifying judgment of others setting us 
where they declare we belong. The im- 
agination, the imaginative warmth and en- 
ergy that plays so lively and so profound a 
part in the spiritual life of the Germanic 
races when compared with other peoples, is 
in Hellene and American alike, and a basis 
of their likeness. 

The Greeks had the inestimable gift of a 
noble curiosity, which drives human beings to 
look further, and still further, and question 



CERTAIN LIKENESSES 327 

if there is not more beyond. They brought 
a clear, fearless intellect to every question, 
a daring through which they irresistibly rose. 
They had, that is, a mind that molded its 
thought to action and, accepting no attitude 
as permanent and final consciously avoided 
a fixed mode, rigidity, crystallization. They 
yearned for and placed themselves in the 
flux of things. They loved the struggle of 
opposing forces, the combat of contraries — 
even to putting antithesis in their philosophy, 
their drama, and into the form of the sen- 
tence in which they expressed their thought. 
Their civilization was essentially modern. 
They exampled the dynamic theory of life — 
constant moving. They were dynamic, not 
static. This makes their qualities, their 
spirit, so difficult of molding to formal defini- 
tion. Life to them was desire for freedom, 
for expression. They fulfilled the law that 
so long as a race is plastic and capable of 
change it is vigorous, and that when that race 
takes on fixity, persistence in form, it is ef- 
fete and prepared for extinction. Their 
passage through their centuries exemplified 
the definition of life by Herbert Spencer, 
' 'the continuous adjustment of internal rela- 



328 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

tions to external relations/ ' and their death 
came in "the non-correspondence of the or- 
ganism with its environment. ' ' 

THE COSMIC VISION THE GREEKS WORKED OUT 

The Hellenes are thousands of years in the 
silent land. Disintegrators of theirs and 
opponents, someone has suggested, live 
mainly in the penumbra of their cutting-off. 
They left a splendid legacy and spoke in 
a voice of surpassing wisdom and beauty to 
all races succeeding them. Always young, 
never gray with time, their life-products eter- 
nize the greatness of ideas and force man- 
kind to acknowledge their priceless value. 
Ideas were to them immortal. The signifi- 
cance of life to their view lay in the idea it 
embodied. In their fortunate days prosper- 
ity was their means to the idea, at no time the 
end. The old Christian simile that poets and 
preachers are but flutes through which the 
Breath of God flows in divine music, is most 
applicable to this people and their demiur- 
gic accomplishment. 

Hellas spiritualized the world, we have 
said. That was the gift of her peoples' 



THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 329 

single-hearted desire to know, of their severe 
and disciplined earnestness, genuineness, 
thoroughness. Hellenism, says an eminent 
critic, is "the habit of fixing our minds upon 
the intelligible law of things," "the letting 
of our consciousness play freely and simply 
upon the facts before us." The Hellenes' 
singleness of spirit, says another, is shown 
in the crystalline lucidity of their speech — 
their directness of phrase (that would be 
called baldness even in the terseness of our 
English) indicating directness of thought, 
freshness of conception. A simplicity, prim- 
itive, going straight to the definite, concrete 
thing, gave them this directness in their en- 
deavor to realize the world. 

The primary conception their vision of life, 
their incisive critical faculty, their unsearch- 
able imagination evolved — that the world is 
a general order — marches persistently. It 
was the basis of their progress. It has been 
the basis of others' Drang nach Wahrheit. 

Order their susceptible, reasoning spirit 
learned from generations about them, from 
the springing and seeding of things, from 
their azure heavens and the stately progress 
of its stars, from their sea and its many- 



330 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

lisping tides, from the motion of the earth 
of which they sometimes retold the legend 
that they were the children. Infinitude they 
felt in the all-nature life of which their sanity 
declared themselves a part. Eternity, also, 
the elements taught them. Their minds 
were fixed on, and their reason endeavoring 
to picture the real world of which they felt 
the physical to be a shadow. Energy, in ac- 
cord with their struggling endeavor, was 
divine, and in their conception of their per- 
manence in it, they made an unconscious 
statement of the principle of its conservation. 
In nature's unconquerable processes they 
saw life, a self-conscious reason acting 
through laws and manifesting itself in the 
natural world. Beason, said Anaxagoras, 
arranges and is the cause of all things. The 
cosmos a universal and eternal whole, obe- 
dient to law, at one with it, so to their con- 
structive imagination — always, in modern 
phrase, in touch with "the fire that burns at 
the heart of things" — "an ever-living fire," 
old Heraclitus said, "lighted according to 
measure and quenched according to meas- 
ure' ' — the cosmos must imply a vitalizing 
life, a divine intelligence, an eternal, per- 



THE GREEK VIEW OF LIFE 331 

fecting mind manifesting itself. Thus they 
proceeded to work out their conception of 
divine dominion, to trace the action and 
method of divine government. They gave 
reasons for the God the Hebrews were de- 
claring. This was the inevitable end of the 
awe of personified nature, seeing God in 
every living bush, which especially bore upon 
and made their epic age beautiful. Es- 
sentially the Hellenes ' religion was reverence 
for powers of the universe, physical as well 
as spiritual. 

But why should not the everlasting reason 
that manifests itself in the order of the world 
of nature make evident its intention in the 
world of active spirit? As they conceived 
the material universe a mysterious whole, 
under the reign of law, never losing its 
majesty and might, so the thought and action 
of man, intelligence and morals, they deter- 
mined, with "that afflatus of religious feeling 
with which the world of Hellenic existence is 
saturated, ' 7 could not be in league with or the 
creatures of chance. The soul of man must 
rest upon eternal laws. "All is divine and 
all is human.' ' Reason, self-active, whose 
masterpiece is law, organized men's lives. 



332 THE GREEK SPIRIT 

Human society is itself neither anarchy nor 
chaos, but subject to law. Within that law 
is evolution of spirit. Men must unite in an 
ordered society. This to the Hellenes meant 
their city-state and the unfolding of human 
life within it. To "live according to na- 
ture, ' ' one of their favorite maxims, meant to 
the Greeks to live according to order, away 
from excess, to live according to laws of self- 
command and self-denial. 

Hellas followed the fate, of the incompa- 
rable and precious as of the most worthless 
civilizations. But the passion of her people 
for the True, Beautiful, Just, and their 
eternal meaning, still burns in broken marbles 
and in scattered fragments of her poets and 
other workers for her advance. Their re- 
mains are to-day the chief est witness of the 
power of thought that our race-life has thus 
far known. For those searching for light 
they are an illumination, and to those seek- 
ing the heroic and beautiful and rational, a 
possession for all time. 



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